The only obligation, said Henry James, to which in advance we may hold a novel is that it be interesting; and if this is true The Adaptable Man is very good indeed. The reader must plough through, or skip, an old-fashioned Prologue and three little chapters of portentous rhetoric, aggravated by lyrical prose; but thereafter the book becomes extraordinarily interesting, indeed bewitching, and remains so to the very last page.

The theme is Past and Present and the struggle between them in the human mind, a ceaseless interaction which may be likened perhaps to that of ocean and land….

[Miss Frame's characters] are not alive. Each is in part an idea, in part a mouthpiece for the author: Their peculiarities do not well up from their innermost being but hang limply on them like an identification tag. For this reason, absorbing as the book is, it does not...