["An Old Captivity"] is a strangely ordered tale. For the most part it holds the interest skillfully, keeps you pegging away page after page, unwilling to put the book down. Mr. Shute can spin a yarn in cracking good prose, and since through three-quarters of the novel he knows expertly what he's talking about …, you enjoy and feel confidence in the accumulation of data and details through which the story moves and has its being.

For this is a fictional record of an airplane flight from Scotland to Greenland, via Iceland, thence to Cape Cod, the Vineland of the Norse Vikings….

Mr. Shute is a practical man about airplanes and pilots qua pilots. But there's a broad streak of romantic mysticism underneath, and this flowers forth in the last quarter of this novel in a way to put to shame even James Hilton in his "Lost Horizon" or...