Prelude To Adventure

Olva Dune is a Cambridge undergraduate who commits a murder and at that moment feels the presence of God. In a tour de force Walpole novelizes the Francis Thompson poem The Hound of Heaven, about a fearful soul pursued by an insistently loving God. (One could enrich the reading of the novel by first reading the poem (“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;… Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue…. Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,/ Save Me, save only Me?”). The psychologist Carl Jung, in a letter to the author, called the 1911 novel “a psychological masterpiece.” Hergesheimer on this novel: “So excellent is the versatility of Hugh Walpole that this writer of dignified and realistic and always beautiful pictures of life has among his books one with all the tension and strange plot of a Poe masterpiece… What happened is so filled with suspense that, very real and human though it is, the plot comes to have all the unexpectedness of the cleverest detective story…. Suspense--color of life--love--fear--triumph--they all mingle in an atmosphere as effective as the Cornish sea.” - Summary by David Wales