I found this novel to be bitingly funny while also drawing a devastating portrait of life in a closed community where people recognize they are being very petty, but cannot bring themselves to rise above their own self-important impulses. I read this shortly after reading Antonia White's Frost in May which is about a girlhood spent in a Catholic boarding school and the similarities are striking. People can be so mean-spirited and those, like Mr. Traill, who are not mean-spirited come across as naive and perhaps not too bright. I think the ending actually works well. All along, Mr. Perrin is shown to have a positive motivation, but he cannot communicate easily with others and so he feels himself to be an outsider. His final action reveals the truth of his character and fits well with what we have learned about him earlier. Walpole's description of the landscape also is very well done. ( )

Mr Perrin and Mr Traill is the third of Hugh Walpole's published works (1911) and the first to receive public acclaim. The story takes place in Moffatt's, a humble public school in Cornwall, and is said to reflect Walpole's experience as a schoolmaster at Epsom College. The school is staffed by disillusioned men trapped, with their wives, by their lack of ability in an inturned and back-biting community controlled by a manipulative headmaster. Into this depressing environment arrives Mr Traill, a young man fresh from university, to take up his first teaching post. His naive optimism blinds him to most of the tensions and sense of failure around him and he can scarcely believe one of his fellow teachers who warns him to get out as soon as he can. He meets, and falls in love with, Isabel Desart, a personable young woman who is a rather incongrous visitor to the home one of the married masters: this developing relationship effectively ties him to the school.

Mr Perrin is a particularly embittered and anxious master who soon becomes jealous of Traill's youth and easy popularity with the boys. The tension between them escalates until there is a physical fight in the common room over a lost umbrella. Mr Perrin has long nurtured a secret love for Isabel, seeing her as a means of escape from his dismal existence so the announcement of the engagement between her and Traill is the last straw: Perrin's hatred knows no bounds.

Walpole develops the depressing environment of the school very well (he was not forgiven by Epsom College until his later fame and fortune) and creates a believable cast of unhappy and unfulfilled people only supported by their petty jealousies and quarrels. It is a depressing book but it is a young man's book and Walpole can't bring himself to end it without some optimism and redemption. I think he perhaps goes too far with this.

Walpole was a popular and prolific novelist who achieved considerable financial success as well as a knighthood. Unfortunately for him, his health was not good and he died relatively young, perhaps before he could establish a lasting reputation for himself as a man of letters. His most successful works, the Herries chronicles, are still in print but his others have disappeared. He is, without question, a competent writer but, like so many other unfashionable and forgotten authors, does not have a distinctive enough voice or message for lasting appeal. ( )