The Dark Forest was, in many ways, a prelude to the latter. Semyonov, the doctor with a square, honey-colored beard, the fatal spirit of the former, accomplishes his final fatality in The Secret City; the narrator of one novel is the narrator of the other; but in The Secret City a great deal that was nebulous--but in no way ineffective--is exactly weighed and expressed.
The surprising quality of The Secret City, and which makes any description of it difficult, is that while it is a tragedy, it is nowhere oppressive. The obvious reason for this is that the story is vividly interesting--not because it includes a remarkable description of the Russian Revolution, but on account of the humanity and variety of its characters, the depth of emotion and brilliancy of surface. In reality, the Revolution constituted a very serious danger, for in creative fiction, the author, the novel, must be greater than the event. A novel holds within its covers a world of its own, a complete reality which, for the moment, must take the place of all other reality; and the presence in it of an overwhelming contemporary event may well crush the illusion, the shining ball, into dull fragments. But this Mr. Walpole avoids in his concentration upon the essentials of his purpose; the Revolution, as a fact, fades before the more enduring veracity, and importance, of his imagination.
Vera and Nina, the fretted Markovitch, and Jerry Lawrence, tied in a knot of passion and longing and bitterness, now struggling blindly and now illuminated with devastating flashes of realization, are more compelling than the accidents of wars and shifting governments. They are the human means of the drama, but--again--it is a pressure lying back of living that is mainly important. In The Secret City, Petrograd itself controls the mood of the action. Mr. Walpole has seen it in a unity of tone far more perfect than his grasp of London. He sees it impressively somber, an iron city mostly in the grip of winter, its blackness emphasized by glittering, immaculate snow, remote and thinly pure skies, and the crystal stars to which he is so individually sensitive. It is, in The Secret City, an evil place, with bare, wind-swept files of apartment houses, broad avenues emptied by the staccato rattle of machine guns and suffocating slums with dead canals stirred with the vision of slow-rising, scaly monsters.