Signpost reviews 2014 archive#

Signpost reviews 2014 archive#

Here you’ll find articles and lists with thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.The Read-Out Instrumentation Signpost: Archive Welcome to the Neglected Books page, edited and mostly written by Brad Bigelow. I found the book entertaining in patches, but difficult to get through and impossible to believe in.ĭespite its strong sales in the first lap, however, The Signpost failed to prove a winner in the long run and has been out of print for over 70 years now. And, indeed, the two visiting strangers are synthetic also.

But, for all the author’s wit and goodwill, her beautiful village and crazy villagers are synthetic, straight out of a clever writer’s notebook. It is an Eire which I for one do not recognise, but it has the effect of toning down Miss Robertson’s customary assurance of judgement to a new speculativeness it neutralises the well-known acidity and induces a warm, odd generosity. Perhaps he missed the part where the RAF pilot sums up the Irish as “The kindest and most ruthless people, the most charming personally and the most stupid politically,” living in a land of “infinite leisure” which makes “poverty so bearable if inevitable.” Certainly one well-qualified critic, the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien, was less than impressed: Robertson dedicated the book “To the good friends I am about to lose in Eire.” The TLS reviewer wondered at this: “To lose through having written this book? But Miss Arnot Robertson would never have made friends of the kind of people who would take offence at The Signpost as another injustice to Ireland.

“So after six, you mean, I just go straight through?” Not worth keeping a man by night at the post.” “The frontier’s closed each night after six o’clock, mind, on the Ballinfaddy road.” “You go by Ulster, amn’t I telling you all this time?” said the clerk, irritable in his turn. A government clerk who conveniently turns out to be from Kildooey (it is fiction, after all) offers him a practical way past the latter problem, though:

Getting from London to neutral Ireland seems impossible at first due to transportation restrictions and a closed border between Ulster and Ireland. The Signpost told of Tom Fairchild, an RAF pilot convalescing after being wounded, returns to Kildooey, a small fishing village in Donegal where he spent some happy summers as a boy. (“What America is Reading” offers a fascinating view of the American book market of the time, showing how many sales came from publisher’s stores (Scribners, Doubleday & Doran, Putnam’s) and department stores (Marshall Field in Chicago, Frederick & Nelson in Seattle, Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, D.C.) A month later, it was #7 on the Herald Tribune’s “What American is Reading” list, which surveyed 52 bookstores across the country, behind A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Lloyd Douglas’s Crucifixion epic The Robe. A Book of the Month Club selection, The Signpost was expected to have good sales based on the popularity a decade earlier of Four Frightened People, and it seems to have done respectably well. Arnot Robertson’s novel, The Signpost across the top half of page 13 on the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, consuming paper that British publishers struggling with wartime shortages would have coveted.