Long Odds

The New York Times Review: A STORY of Western Africa, in the Portuguese wilderness, in a land whose vast, crude, helpless misery makes it seem forgotten of God and be-ruined by man, is "Long Odds," by Harold Bindloss, The author remarks, in the cours ... Read more

The New York Times Review: A STORY of Western Africa, in the Portuguese wilderness, in a land whose vast, crude, helpless misery makes it seem forgotten of God and be-ruined by man, is "Long Odds," by Harold Bindloss, The author remarks, in the course of the narrative, that "it is very difficult to be an optimist in Africa," and his book does not lessen that task outside of Africa. He is engrossed in the telling of the story, and so does not appear to be especially interested in the showing up of colonial methods or in drawing the attention of civilization to the burden which the white man has laid upon the shoulders of the black. But in the telling of the story, which has done remarkably well, he gives so near and intimate a view of the hot, steaming wilderness, of guarded bands of negroes pattering silently down its tracks to some trader's compound, of a few fever-stricken white men spending their lives in the endeavor to mitigate a little the consequences of commercial brutality, of the atrocities perpetrated in the name of civilization for the sake of gain, that the wickedness of it all speaks for itself. The hero of the story is an Englishman who at some previous time had been kicked out of the Colonial Service, the victim of unjust accusation. Stranded in Portuguese West Africa, he had sounded the depths of outcast degradation. Less