The Dop Doctor

This is a novel book. Mr. Dehan's idea of realism includes more than a touch of brutality, if not, indeed, of coarseness, he contrives in The Dop Doctor to present his readers with a vividly interesting novel. The best thing in the book is the author's minute account of the siege of Gueldersdorp, a name which is a transparent alias for Mafeking. It may be doubted, however, whether his portraits of the living people who were the chief actors in the scenes he depicts are in the best of taste, even though he disguises their identity under pseudonyms. The end of the book is much less engrossing than the description of the siege. The situation of the married couple, in which the husband is in love with his wife, but leaves her free, and she gradually returns his affection, but does not like to say so, is rather conventional and commonplace. Readers, however, who do not mind having the horrors of war laid naked before their eyes will be intensely interested by Mr. Dehan's book, and will be unable to read without a thrill his accounts of the adventures and escapes of the heroic defenders of the historic little town. The novel is of considerable length, but the reader's attention will be kept on the stretch, at any rate up to the chapter in which the relief is described.