
It would be a crime to give away even the barest outline of Rebecca West's apparently simple, always agonizing first novel. We shall say only that The Return of the Soldier concerns the title character and three very different women to whom he is linked in very different ways--by blood, by marriage, and by love. It is also an imaginative study (one drenched in realism) of intimacy and illusion, possession and a terrible, destructive snobbery. On one estate outside London, even as the Great War