Days of Disillusion

This novel, published in 1926, is set in Sydney between 1894 and 1926. The central character, Robert Watson, is the son of a suburban stationer, who becomes ambitious in business after his father's premature death. The book is divided into six sections of Robert's life: the little boy (he was born about 1885), the youth, the young man, the married man, the father and a final section termed “the new day”. Towards the end of the novel he battles disillusion and dejection, losing his zeal for business. After experiencing tragedy, he verbalises his newfound philosophy: “I would not be dissatisfied with the world and the people in it because somehow I would understand that no life in the world is perfect and that human nature is but a process of becoming. I would know that anything human has the element of potential failure in it and that we must not make idols of human beings — we shall always be disillusioned; but that we should put our faith in the unseen.”

The author, Chester Francis Cobb (born 8 June 1899) grew up in suburban Sydney. On leaving school, he worked for Sydney's Daily Telegraph. Both his parents having died prematurely, in 1921 he emigrated to England, the country of his father's birth. He settled on a farm in Oxfordshire. His first novel, partly based on his father's life, was published in 1925 and was the first Australian novel to display the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. This novel, with a similar setting, was published a year later. He wrote a third novel but it wasn't accepted for publication. Although he had a short life (he died in 1943) and a small body of work, his contribution to Australian fiction was recognised in his inclusion among Colin Roderick's Twenty Australian Novelists in 1947.

The novel doesn't detail the central character's experience of war. When trying to explain his disillusionment, he wonders whether the war was a factor:
“The war... it's no use saying it was the war. I was beginning to be restless and discontented and altogether fed up just before the war. As a matter of fact, if I want to be frank with myself, it was because I was fed up that I went to the war. Going to the war solved the problem for the time. Or it postponed the solving of the problem. But the problem's still here. I'm no nearer the solution than I was before the war.”
Later, when describing an unusually pleasant state of mind, he recalls feeling the same way on one occasion on the Western Front:
“What is this something so peaceful that I feel? ... I felt it first one night in the old office before the war. Since then I've flet it now and again at different times. One early morning in the line in France. And several times when I couldn't sleep at night in hospital [presumably having been wounded]. It was there. It has no voice. It doesn't speak. It doesn't move. It isn't anything that can be seen. It just is. And it's more than a feeling of peace. It's a complete body of life. It is life — a life. The peacefulness is what it is in its entirety. That sums it up.”