Publisher's Synopsis
It is seldom that a novel of such sustained power, such unquestioned magnitude as The House in Demetrius Road, by J. D. Beresford, may be adequately and comprehensively summed up in so few words. It is a grim, compelling, relentless book, one that oddly enough suggests kinship with two other stories, in spite of many inherent dissimilarities of substance and style: Snaith's Broke of Covenden and George Douglas's House with the Green Shutters. Mr. Beresford gets his effects with a minimum of material; the whole story is practically a drama with three characters and one stage setting. There is first of all Robin Greg, author, statesman, possibly future cabinet minister, but admittedly eccentric, with a veiled hint of something more sinister. Then, there is his private secretary, Martin Bond, newly arrived, ill at ease, scenting some hidden mystery, some secret vice. And lastly, there is Margaret Hamilton, Greg's sister-in-law, a woman of so fine a type as to compel any decent man's reverence and chivalry, yet whom it is evident that Greg both scorns and hates. The study of Greg from a pathological standpoint is masterly.
With all his strange, erratic, illogical conduct, his sudden fits of anger, his days of lethargy, the reader is as slow as Martin Bond himself was, to grasp the crucial fact that Greg is chronically alcoholic, day and night under the control of the whiskey that he secretly keeps hidden in scores of little flasks, in all sorts of unexpected corners of the house. But when Bond and Margaret break down the wall of reticence regarding this hidden tragedy, this blight upon the career of one of the most promising statesmen of his time, they unite forces for the physical and moral redemption of Greg, first against his will, and then for a time with his willing and even eager cooperation. There have been many stories written around this theme of the struggle to rescue a fellow being from the clutch of drugs, but never one in which the horror of it and the pity of it are driven home more insistently or with more compelling force.
And never, it should be added, a story where failure is more definitely foreshadowed, and worked up to with a more relentless surety, a finer artistry of detail. A depressing book undoubtedly; you think afterward of that house standing in the isolation of Demetrius Road as of a devil-haunted spot, an earthly symbol of the Inferno.
But whether we like it or not, we needs must catch our breath a little, wonder who else writing at the present day could have done this thing, and make a mental register to keep a keen outlook for all future volumes bearing the sign manual of J. D. Beresford.
-The Bookman, Vol. 40 [1915]
