Hugh Walpole

Captain Nicholas Hugh Walpole

The story about a evil brother who comes back to his family for a visit and the devastation he reaps on his contented London family. This novel is a study of human conflict within a conventional family of the 1930's, tested by the invasion of ideas in the person of the family's black sheep, Captain Nicholas. A sequel to The Green Mirror, the character of Captain Nicholas is the most original of all Walpole's creation.in Captain Nicholas, story of a vagabond black sheep who turns up after ten years' silence, and disrupts a placid, well-ordered London household, tearing apart their ideals of honesty and goodness and simplicity and affection. An emotional and intellectual sadist, he works by devious ways, to an end the reader -- but not the characters -- is enabled to foresee from the start. Not such pleasant reading as most of his books -- nor so gruesome as The Man With the Red Hair, but a brilliant bit of characterization, and an insidious bit of social commentary.