The Burning Glass, The Flashing Stream, The River Line
The Burning Glass, The Flashing Stream, The River Line
Charles Morgan
The Burning Glass, by Charles Morgan, is one more melodrama in which a scientist discovers a new source of power —this time by harnessing the heat of the sun.
The author of The Fountain is a stylishly earnest writer who, while posing philosophic debates over when the new weapon should be used, offers cultivated characters who spout Shakespeare and Keats and dress regularly for destruction. They are all cozily upper-class — indeed, the Prime Minister who hurriedly arrives to claim Christopher Terriford’s momentous formula for Britain was once a beau of Christopher’s lady mother. But Scientist Christopher as firmly resists the P.M. on moral grounds: arguing that spiritual matters, today, lag far behind scientific ones. Christopher will surrender his formula only in time of war or dire necessity.
Meanwhile Christopher’s chief assistant — who is in love with Christopher’s wife — talks too much to a white-tied foreign gentleman, and Christopher is kidnaped.
Available
2013
978-1-8494-3182-8
Drama
Oberon Books Ltd
Charles Morgan
Charles Langbridge Morgan was a playwright and novelist of English and Welsh parentage. The main themes of his work were, as he himself put it, “Art, Love, and Death”, and the relation between them. Themes of individual novels range from the paradoxes of freedom (The Voyage, The River Line), through passionate love seen from within (Portrait in a Mirror) and without (A Breeze of Morning), to the conflict of good and evil (The Judge’s Story) and the enchanted boundary of death (Sparkenbroke).
Morgan was educated at the Naval Colleges of Osborne and Dartmouth and served as a midshipman in the China Fleet until 1913. On the outbreak of war he was sent with Churchill’s Naval Division to defend Antwerp. He was interned in Holland which provided the setting for his best-selling novel The Fountain.
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