Herick & Friends

Herrick & Friends

THE SHADOW FLIES--Rose Macaulay--Harper ($2.50).

From her reputation as a satirical novelist (Potterism, Orphan Island, Staying With Relations) Rose Macaulay has fled all the way into the 17th Century, to a copiously documented historical romance of Cavalier England. Smacking more often of Aladdin's than the student's lamp. The Shadow Flies offers the reader a rich mouthful of a spicy age. Parson-Poet Robert Herrick's Devonshire parish (1640) is the first scene, with the parson cursing his parishioners by name from the pulpit, wining with his London friend Sir John Suckling, tutoring pretty young Julian Conybeare, the atheist doctor's daughter. Julian's father falls foul of the law when he tries to protect an old woman from the witch-finders; he and Julian and Parson Herrick take a tactical holiday to Cambridge, just then a political and poetical storm centre. There they meet Poets John Milton, supervising a performance of his masque, Comus, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland. Julian adores Cleveland, is happy when he condescends to make love to her. But the shadows fly fast: in a brawl between Cleveland and her Puritan brother, Julian is killed; England is split by its worst civil war; Parson Herrick goes back to his Devonshire parish to be ousted by the Covenanters.

The Shadow Flies is full of talk, much of it good, all of it Caroline, some of it (notably the Devonshire dialect) colorfully incomprehensible.

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