Other Fiction Walpole, Hugh: Prelude to adventure; v1 26 July 2021

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Praised in a letter to the author by Carl Jung as “a psychological masterpiece," Walpole's early (1912) novel is the story of a Cambridge undergraduate, Olva Dune, who commits a murder. Ironically, at the moment he commits his crime, he feels the presence of God.

It starts with a murder. Dune the silent, the cleverest yet laziest and most snobbish man in his class at Cambridge, has struck down a red-faced, silly, ignoble, beast of an undergraduate who has been boasting of his conquest over a poor little shopgirl. He did not mean to do murder, but there lay the man dead, where the gray Druids' Wood dripped with rain and gray twilight.

He calmly went back to his rooms and kept silent. What happened is so filled with suspense that, very real and human though it is, the plot comes to have all the unexpectedness of the cleverest detective story.
And Dune's vision of God, as a great gray spirit standing gigantic there on the campus, waiting, waiting, is a revelation in spiritual motives. Dune's love story, too, is fascinating and his victory.

Suspense, color of life, love, fear and triumph they all mingle in an atmosphere as effective as the Cornish sea.

Second in the Phantasier series. The first is Maradick at forty. The third is Portrait of a man with red hair. The fourth is Above the dark tumult.

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