The Cinder Buggy

WHEN the reviewers must review a popular book about oil, or the history of the automobile, or the development of water power, they have a way of saying that they found it more interesting than fiction. There is a new novel called The Cinder Buggy, by Mr. Garet Garrett, which gives particular point to this way of saying. The Cinder Buggy is an epic of steel, to borrow another convention of the reviewers; together with a disclosure of various fictional human minds there runs the true story of the development of steel in this country, and it is the latter is the absorbing, exciting part of Mr. Garrett’s book; indeed, it is perhaps not too enthusiastic to say that there is not anywhere else in literature an account of the Pittsburg Era so compelling, so dramatic as is here. Reading, we had the feeling that the author held an immense grip on the history of steel, knew it as he knows the inside of his pocket; the steel sections of this novel were so good that they quite overwhelmed the story sections; we found ourselves bending back the pages which continued the plot to see how far it was until there would be more description of ore or pig iron or wrought iron or steel, just as in the opposite way in other novels we have sometimes turned the long pages describing “scenery” to see when the story would begin again. And as we finished The Cinder Buggy we asked ourselves whether it was not inevitable that any book, no matter by however able a writer, which aimed to reveal human minds and emotions and to tell the story of a thing at the same time, as this novel does, would end by doing the latter and not the former. In a novel, as in life itself, “the thing runs wild, and doth the “man unking.” In the novel, Le Maitre de Forges, Georges Ohnet set forth characters which, like Mr. Garrett’s characters, cannot bend or be bent, and so must break or be broken. But Ohnet decided to make his principal character into an iron-master after he had conceived him as a man. It is our guess that Mr. Garet Garrett conceived his men and women as part of the history of steel first and made them flesh and blood.