"If one wishes to read a good story without being preached at, he can do no better than read _The Wooden Horse_. The story catches the atmosphere of the Cornish coast, and you have the feel of the salt spray in your nostrils as you read."--_Indianapolis News_.
"As delicate a piece of work as any modern novelist has attempted and superlatively well done."--_Lexington Kentucky Herald_.
Hugh Walpole spent some time as a master at an English provincial school, and consequently he has been able to put into _The Gods and Mr. Perrin_ quite all the atmosphere of a school where the system, the confinement, the routine of petty tasks get on everyone’s nerves and turn a group of human beings into strange hybrids that are at once machines and animals with raw nerves sticking out all over them. Whoever has--whether in the confinement of a school or an unhappy office or a jarring household--been smothered by the atmosphere of some set of human beings, will find himself in this book, and rejoice with Perrin’s fight to break free.
_The Gods and Mr. Perrin_ finds Mr. Perrin coming back to the workhouse-like school for boys at the beginning of term-time, determined to be kind this year. But the drudgery, the smell of cold mutton and chalk, the endless succession of frightened boys, the smug ironies of the reverend head-master, get on his nerves, and then the Cat of Cruelty begins to whisper at his ear and suggest that it would be pleasant to twist one boy’s ear and cuff another.
He bursts out, at last, gloriously, and at a solemn gathering of the school for the awarding of prizes, tells what he really thinks of the hypocritical headmaster and the drab futility of the whole school. Uncompromisingly, unflinchingly, Walpole has painted that school as it is. His picture should be enough to make any head-master who still believes in education by repression go off and commit suicide. It should be enough to make any man who is yearly growing more choked, more afraid of life, more smothered in a stuffy environment, rebel and fight his way out of that kingdom of dullness, cost what it may.
But because of that very spirit of revolt, _The Gods and Mr. Perrin_ is not a drably disagreeable novel which will frighten off soft-minded readers.