Robert Keable is, in a sense, a literary enigma. Prior to the publication of Simon called Peter, which definitely established him as a leading: novelist, his claims to literary achievement amounted only to a small collection of missionary tales, of a combined Anglo-Catholic and spiritualistic flavour, in the more or less obscure pages of The Treasury. The reverential and almost priestly touch which pervades these stories is entirely absent from the novels which have brought him fame. And therein lies the enigma.

In the preface to his latest novel, Recompence, which is a sequel to Simon called Peter, Mr. Keable refers somewhat bitterly to the reception given to his first work by the religious press, although, he says, ‘it was written sincerely and simply as ever pen was set to paper.’ That may be,—but the assumption that he was a Catholic convert, made by his critics in the Anglican press, though untrue, was not unwarranted. Catholic critics, too, felt that his reverence and respect for their dogmas and practices savoured of impertinence, placed side by side with views of immorality all the more interesting in that they were unconventional. The secular press, without probing beneath the surface, welcomed the book as a piece of stark realism, an exposure of the degradation of moral values due to the war.

It seems inevitable that critics should identify authors with their principal characters and regard a novel as a more or less biographical work. Hence it appears that Mr. Keable is Peter Graham in Simon called Peter and Recompence, Chris in The Mother of all Living and Paul Kestern in Peradventure.