"The Master," subtitled "An Adventure Story," concerns two well-born English children held captive in a hollow rock in mid-Atlantic, where amid the sough of water and air and the whir of a helicopter a murderous antique of a scientist and his grotesque staff have devised a means to rule the world. It is one of the most beguiling and yet one of the most straightforward of Mr. White's tales; and while in some respects it is a new departure for him, it resumes firmly a career that had seemed to sink into confused dabbling.

Mr. White was born in 1906 in India of English parents, was at Cheltenham and Cambridge, was a schoolmaster at Stowe; then threw over teaching and the more solidly worked novels of his teaching years, rewrote the Arthurian legends in a new style -- fashioned of conscious anachronisms, faint twitches of bawdry and gusts of lyricism -- and made his fame. Then growing malice, and some delicately tendentious fantasy; then a series of books, satires and works on falconry and eighteenth-century gossip, each more dismally received than the last. Then "The Master." Never has Mr. White's taste been surer, or his style more easily directed to all ages and sorts of readers at once, than in this. (p. 4)

"The Master" is a splendid adventure. Like most adventures that obliterate the reader's age, it recalls Robert Louis Stevenson. That magical sense that the real and palpable world is infested with waifs and strays from eternity is Stevenson's The secret war that rattles through the unconscious city and is fought out in gentlemen's clubs and seedy pensions is one myth: it comes to [Joseph] Conrad and [John] Buchan and the early Graham Greene from Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights." And the other myth, the myth of "The Master," of the cave or isle or enchanted castle which is like a solid model of Man's peril and destiny -- though its scenario is as old as [Shakespeare's] "The Tempest," as old as [Homer's] "The Odyssey," as old as childhood itself -- comes to us through [Stevenson's] "Treasure Island." For it was surely Stevenson who taught Mr. White the sinister effect of charming eccentricities -- the sinister Chinese gentleman named Mr. Blenkinsop, the huge tongueless Negro called Pinkie who is a professed follower of Gandhi, the ex-doctor Totty McTurk who has a different dialect every day.

Where once Mr. White based his fantasy on anachronisms, which are the comic way of suggesting eternal things, now he makes clever use of this myth wherein the familiar gesture and the homely phrase suddenly take on a mad ceremoniousness, like rituals through which philosophy is speaking; and this is the beautiful melodramatic way of hinting at eternal things. (pp. 4, 24)