MJ Nicholls's Reviews > The Brothers/The Croquet Player

A pair of novellas published by Wells in the late 1930s, both looking ahead despairingly as Europe moved inexorably toward another war. The Brothers is a talky thriller where two warring dictators who happen to be long-separated twins learn of their mutual keenness for humanity to shake itself into progress through world peace . . . with non-hilarious consequences. The Croquet Player is a very strange tale of an effeminate chap who plays croquet with his auntie who finds himself in a strange town suffering from a mental malaise. This is later revealed as a comment on the human race devolving from an intelligent species back to cavemen as the mind viruses of Fascism and National Socialism sweep across Europe. Dispatches from a troubled mind very swiftly reaching the end of its tether.