The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1859)

The Woman in White is an exciting and complex story with a memorable cast of heroes, villains, and sundry other interesting characters. Wilkie Collins lived between 1824 and 1889 and his life overlapped those of other well-known Victorian authors whose books I’ve enjoyed reading:

Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870)
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810 - 1865)
Charlotte Bronte (1816 - 1855)
Emily Bronte (1818 - 1848)

There are certain elements common to Victorian novels and The Woman in White has all the complexities of Dickens (but a few less characters and so easier to follow); the exploration of character that Gaskell does so beautifully; the thwarted love that Charlotte Bronte depicts in Jane Eyre, and the physical and psychological violence of Emily Bronte’sWuthering Heights.
It is a wonderfully written blend of melodrama, mystery and Victorian-style identity theft. There are twists, turns, and false trails, as well as some very humorous descriptions of different characters. Collins was a gifted wordsmith and one of the best known, best loved, and, for a time, best paid of Victorian fiction writers.

Friendship is a thread throughout the story as well as contrasting themes of selflessness and selfishness, bravery and cowardice, loyalty and treachery. Collins studied to be a lawyer and, in the Preamble, he explains why he uses various narrators to tell the story. This method of telling the story gives the reader a well-rounded insight into the various characters. It also allows for a good amount of humour:

The story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness—with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.

Rather than go into details about the plot, I’ll leave you with some quotations to pique your interest if you, like me, have for years put off reading this book. I think it is a classic not to be missed.

Walter Hartright, a young artist and hero of the story is employed by Mr. Frederick Fairlie to instruct two young ladies in the art of painting in watercolours. This is Walter’s first encounter with one of them, Marian Halcombe:

“My first glance round me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room, with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!”

And his impressions of Miss Fairlie’s (Mr. Fairlie’s niece and heiress) former governess:

Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life… A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

Count Fosco, immensely fat and a suave, dangerous villain:

"I am thinking," he remarked quietly, "whether I shall add to the disorder in this room by scattering your brains about the fireplace."

Mr. Fairlie, a totally self-absorbed and spineless ‘invalid’ who hates being troubled or put out and has a mortal fear of infection, is visited by the Count and learns of his niece’s illness:

Good God!” I said. “Is it infectious?”
“Not at present,” he answered, with detestable composure. “It may turn to infection—but no such deplorable complication had taken place when I left Blackwater Park. I have felt the deepest interest in the case, Mr. Fairlie—I have endeavoured to assist the regular medical attendant in watching it—accept my personal assurances of the uninfectious nature of the fever when I last saw it.”
Accept his assurances! I never was farther from accepting anything in my life. I would not have believed him on his oath. He was too yellow to be believed. He looked like a walking-West-Indian- epidemic. He was big enough to carry typhus by the ton, and to dye the very carpet he walked on with scarlet fever. In certain emergencies my mind is remarkably soon made up. I instantly determined to get rid of him.

Mr. Fairlie’s lawyer was disgusted with his client who only considered his own interests. He remarked:

“No daughter of mine should have been married to any man alive under such a settlement as I was compelled to make for Laura Fairlie.”

A great book!

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (1903)

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (subtitled, A Record of Secret Service) was published in 1903 and is considered to be the first modern spy thriller.
Childers had an interesting background; he was raised in Ireland, educated at Cambridge, and was a clerk in the House of Commons for fifteen years. During the First World War he did reconnaissance work in the Royal Naval Air service and served as an Intelligence Officer.
He spent time sailing in the North Sea and the Channel and also explored the shoals of the Dutch, Danish and German coasts.

The Story

Charles Carruthers, having had his carefully laid holiday plans upended by his superiors in the Foreign Office, had settled into a dismal routine in London. With his acquaintances and friends off on holidays, he had come to the humiliating realisation that ‘the world I found so indispensable could after all dispense with me.’
It was while he was in this depressing state that he received a letter bearing a German post-mark and marked ‘Urgent’. It was from Arthur Davies, an Oxford acquaintance from his student days, whom he had only seen on a few occasions over the past three years, asking him if he’d care to join him in a little yachting and duck shooting in the Baltic.
Carruthers’ memory of Davies was that of a dull type of chap who, unlike himself, took no care with his appearance, and had no money to spend on luxuries like a decent yacht. The thought of spending October freezing in the Baltic with an eccentric nobody like Davies did not appeal to him. Despite his misgivings, he felt a strange lightening of his spirits and there being no other alternatives, he telegrammed Davies to say he would join him.
Wilhelm II was Kaiser of Germany in 1903 when The Riddle of the Sands was published. He had begun to expand the German Navy with the intention of rivalling the British Navy and making the German Empire a global power.
When Carruthers joined his friend he discovered that Davies had something other than duck shooting in mind and their boat trip on the Dulcibella became a journey of intrigue and danger when they discovered German war ships among the Frisian Islands intent on possibly invading Britain.
An attempt had already been made upon Davies’ life and they discover that an Englishman turned traitor was responsible. Both men become involved in espionage which takes them around shoals and dangerous tidal areas. 

Childers wrote an exciting narrative but there are many nautical terms that not everyone will appreciate. I don’t have much knowledge about this type of subject but the writing is excellent and quite humorous, especially in the first few chapters. It is a very atmospheric book that conjures up the desolate areas of East Friesland, its islands and tidal areas. The book includes maps/charts based on British and German Admiralty charts which are regularly referred to in the story.

The Riddle of the Sands was a wake up call for Britain to the threat of Imperial Germany and caused a sensation when it was first published. The book has been called a Yachtsman’s Classic and was a favourite of Arthur Ransome, the author of the Swallows & Amazons books. I read somewhere that the houseboat in Ransome’s books had a copy of The Riddle of the Sands on its bookshelves but I have been unable to find it in the two books pictured above. I did read in Chapter 7 of ‘We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea’ that John ‘went down to the cabin and took Knight’s ‘Sailing’ from the bookshelf‘ in order to look up the page on signals and fog. Davies had a copy of one of Knights’ books in his library on the Dulcibella.

Older readers who loved the Arthur Ransome books would probably enjoy Childers’ book, although my children had a mixed reaction to the book. My eldest son thought it was great and my youngest said it had too much information on sailing etc. Anyone who likes technical details, geography and a good spy story should enjoy it. It’s not high action but it does flow well and is quite suspenseful in places. If a book is well-written I can put up with technical details of which I’m mostly ignorant. The interplay between Carruthers and Davies and their individual characters adds to the interest and dynamics of the story.

Erskine Childers had a sad end. He was a supporter of Irish Republicanism and was executed ‘over possession of a pistol.’ His son, 16 years of age at the time of his death, was later the President of Ireland. See here and here for more about this. 

                                                The Island of Memmert 

The Riddle of the Sands is available on Gutenberg.

The Courts of the Morning by John Buchan (1929)

The Courts of the Morning is John Buchan’s 15th novel. Although Richard Hannay narrates the prologue, he then dips out of the story and lets the characters involved continue the narration. The characters include Sandy Arbuthnot, a master of disguise, Lawrence of Arabia type and skilled linguist, who is the central character in a previous book, Greenmantle; John S. Blenkiron, a dyspeptic American, also in Greenmantle, and Mr. Standfast and  Archie Roylance, a friend of Richard Hannay who pops up in a number of Buchan’s novels. In this book he is newly married to Janet and as the story begins, they have just decided on a trip to South America for their honeymoon which they had previously delayed.

The Courts of the Morning takes place in the fictional country of Olifa in South America. Blenkiron discovers that the government of Olifa is controlled by the powerful Gobernador, Senor Castor, the owner of the booming Gran Seco copper mine.

‘The Gran Seco is the true Foreign Legion, and it needs no discipline. Castor asks only for two things, brains and submission to his will, and once a man enters his service he can never leave it.
…he did not need to keep a close eye on his subordinates; they had become automata, minor replicas of himself, whose minds worked in accurate conformity with his. Of this loyalty there could be no doubt; they had lost the capacity for treason, since treason implies initiative.’

Sandy and Blenkiron uncover Castor’s secret power over the ‘type Gran Seco’ who call themselves the new Conquistadors or conquerors and have surrendered their wills into the hand of their master. Castor is a gifted chemist and develops a drug to keep the Conquistadors subservient.

‘It kills in the end, but only after a considerable period, and during that period it gives increased intellectual vitality and an almost insane power of absorption, varied by languors like the opium-eaters. Those who once take to it can never free themselves, and they are the slaves of him who can supply it. Willing slaves, competent slaves, even happy slaves, but only the shadows of what once were men.’

Castor’s ultimate plan is to destroy Democracy and undermine America. Sandy who had often criticised America, when asked by Blenkiron’s niece, Barbara, why he was involving himself in a quarrel not his own said:

“I don’t know. I never analyse my motives. But I think I think I would go on with this affair, even if your uncle were out of it. You see, down at the bottom of my heart I hate the things that Castor stands for. I hate cruelty. I hate using human beings as pawns in a game of egotism. I hate all rotten, machine-made, scientific creeds. I loathe and detest all that superman cant, which is worse nonsense than the stuff it tries to replace. I really believe in liberty, though it’s out of fashion…And because America in her queer way is on the same side, I’m for America.”

The Courts of the Morning is an interesting adventure and it was a pleasure to have characters from previous novels involved in another plot. There were some situations where you had to suspend your disbelief, but hey, it’s John Buchan and that is often par for the course. One of these situations was when Archie and Janet trick Castor into coming aboard their boat for a meal and then kidnap  him. He was taken to the Courts of the Morning, a hideout in the mountains away from the city. It was while here that he began a friendship for the first time in his life and had a turnaround in his thinking – “We leave murder to your Conquistadors. We think so highly of you that we’re going to have a try at saving your soul.”

“This hill-top is bad for me,” he once told her. “I have no facts to work upon and I begin to make pictures. Wasn’t it Napoleon who said that we should never think in pictures, but always look at things as if through a telescope–bring reality close to one, but always reality?”

“Isn’t that begging the question?” the girl replied. “Reality for us is what we make of things. We may make them conform to our picture. It is what we all do. It is what you have been doing all your life, Excellency.”

“But your pictures and mine have been very different. I am a scientist and you are a romantic.”

“You are the romantic. You have tried to force the world inside a theory, and it is too big for that. We humble people never attempt the impossible. You are a self-deceiver, you know.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because of your intellectual pride. It is only humility that sees clearly and knows its limitations.”

The conversation between Janet and Castor above and Sandy’s comments below about megalomaniacs having no sense of humour are ideas I’ve come across in other novels. Josephine Tey’s Detective Grant said something similar about murderers in one of her books. I thought about the despots/megalomaniacs/murderers of recent history: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot…how true – no humility and no humour.

“First of all, I need hardly tell you that the world to-day is stuffed with megalomania. Megalomania in politics, megalomania in business, megalomania in art–there are a dozen kinds. You have the man who wants to be a dictator in his own country, you have the man who wants to corner a dozen great businesses and control the finance of half the world, you have the man who wants to break down the historic rules of art and be a law to himself. The motive is the same in every case–rootlessness, an unbalanced consciousness of ability, and an overweening pride They want to rule the world, but they do not see that by their methods they must first deprive the world of its soul and that what would be left for their dictatorship would be an inanimate corpse. You see, for all their splendid gift they have no humour.”

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy is Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s (1874 -1936) spiritual biography. His purpose in writing this book was to ‘attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it.’ It was not meant to be an ecclesiastical discourse but a ‘slovenly autobiography.’

Orthodoxy was a mind-bending book, full of mental pictures, paradoxes and metaphors. It was a mentally challenging read for me and made me feel quite dense at times but on the last page Chesterton actually wrote, ‘As I close this chaotic volume…’ which made me feel I was a lesser idiot than I thought I was.
The man was brilliant and original. He debated the great minds of his day and often left them defeated. In spite of this, he earned their respect and was counted as a friend.
Described as an eccentric 300-pound scatter-brained Victorian journalist, and a 'kindly and gallant cherub,' Chesterton would double up in laughter at personal insults from his opponents. His command of the English language was supreme and his memory prodigious, but for such a brilliant man he had a deep humility.

Orthodoxy is one of the most quotable books I’ve ever read, so I will let these extracts speak rather than try to summarise what Chesterton said - which I couldn’t do anyhow.

‘Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has list his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.’

One of Chesterton’s opponents was George Bernard Shaw. He described Shaw as someone who had an heroically large and generous heart; but it wasn’t in the right place, and this was typical of the society of their time.

‘But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place…
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this had been exactly reversed…
The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility, made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful of his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.’

Chesterton’s ideas are controversial; his thoughts on suicide, for example, would be objectionable today, but his focus was not so much on the individual as on his/her underlying dogma. (He had struggled with depression himself. See his poem, ‘A Ballad of Suicide.’)

He said of suicide that,

‘…it is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; so far as he is concerned he wipes out the world…'

A lady I know emigrated to Australia from Germany when she was in her teens in the late 1950’s. She later discovered a horde of nihilistic literature her parents had brought with them. They had swallowed the Nazi philosophy that once you got to a certain age you had passed your use by date, and for the sake of sparing others the burden of looking after you, your duty was to exit this life.
That’s the underlying nihilistic dogma I think Chesterton was addressing.
And death isn’t confined to the person who commits suicide. It ripples out and affects their family, their friends, their community.
I’ve never forgotten how a friend of mine described finding his mother after she had gassed herself in her car. Hurt, confusion and distress was the ripple effect on his life, and as far as I know, the ripples never disappeared. It was a senseless act that he could not come to terms with or begin to understand.

‘A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.’‘Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the 12th century, but is not credible in the 20th. You might as well believe that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays but not on Tuesdays…

What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.’

Although Orthodoxy was written in 1909, it hasn’t lost its relevance for the present. It is a book that could be read many times and still be fresh. The conclusion Chesterton came to in his searching was that the riddles of God prove more satisfying than the answers proposed without God.

‘The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy.’

'And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.'

In my edition of the book, Philip Yancey’s introduction explains that Chesterton looked at a different aspect of the question, ‘If there is a loving God why do people suffer?’

‘Christians look for ways to explain the origin of suffering. Should atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness & meaninglessness?’

'It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before.'"SERIOUSNESS is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity."

'Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.'

One of the ideas probed by Chesterton in his spiritual journey was that of the belief that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages; an idea promulgated every time there’s a push to get rid of a ‘traditional’ viewpoint.

‘Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine.

(How the Irish Saved Civilisation by Thomas Cahill is an interesting tangent to this argument, too.)

‘If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.’G.K. Chesterton was a prolific writer and wrote around eighty books, four thousand essays, about two-hundred short stories, as well as a few hundred poems.

His Father Brown detective stories are his most accessible books if you are just starting out and are enjoyable for anyone who likes detective fiction. Some of my children loved The Man Called Thursday when they were about 13 or 14 years old; a couple of them didn’t. I’ve enjoyed his poetry and some of his essays best.
Orthodoxy was a similar experience to reading C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man - dense and challenging but great soul food.

'A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.'

Some interesting links:

Who is This Guy?

The Humor of G.B. Shaw and G.K. Chesterton

Joy Clarkson recorded a series of podcasts on Orthodoxy in 2019 on Speaking With Joy (Thanks to Cate for mentioning this)

The first link above has a wide range of Chesterton resources & a podcast on YouTube.

Some of Chesterton's Poetry:

The Donkey

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

Lepanto

The House of Christmas

Essays:

Tremendous Trifles - these short essays are a great introduction to Chesterton's non-fiction

G.K. Chesterton's Works Online has an exhaustive list of his work that is available free online.

The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sherriff (1939)

The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff (1939) is classed as science fiction/speculative science fiction, or ‘visionary fiction.’ This is a genre I really like. ''What if?..." H.G. Wells and John Wyndham both wrote this type of fiction and Sherriff was thought to be the missing link between them.

In this story the moon is thrown out of its orbit and is heading towards the earth. The months leading up to this cataclysm are recorded by Edgar Hopkins, a self-important bachelor who is caught up in the minutiae of everyday life while waiting, looking after his prize chickens and getting upset that his views on the coming catastrophe aren't taken into consideration. Hopkins isn't a very likeable man at first but over time he changes for the better. He becomes like an uncle to a brother and sister who are on their own and they make a life together for a time. As the end draws near, he places his written record in a thermos flask and hundreds of years after Western Civilisation has disappeared, his manuscript is found by the Royal Society of Abyssinia. 

I enjoyed this story although it did get repetitive at times. That may have been a purposeful ploy by the author and reflective of Hopkins behaviour and inner ramblings. As with other writers of visionary fiction the focus is not so much on the coming event but on human behaviour. 

Death on the Riviera by John Bude (1952)

I’ve read a few of John Bude’s books since they were reprinted by the British Library, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. His plots have been clever and inventive – the solving of a murder crime in Death on the Riviera was particularly imaginative.

Detective Inspector Meredith is quite happy to leave the miserable weather of London to work on a case with the French police. Taking the eager young Acting-Sergeant Freddy Strang along with him, they head off to the French Riviera, their aim being to apprehend a well-known English forger thought to be heading up a lucrative counterfeit money racket in the area.
There are a number of threads to this story which make it an interesting read as well as a mystery that isn’t solved until the last couple of pages, something John Bude tends to do in all his mysteries.

When Meredith and Strang arrive in France they meet Bill Dillon, a fellow Englishman who like themselves has no idea how to get where they want to go. A local man helps them on their way and unknown to any of them, the three men are destined to eventually meet again in Menton at the Villa of a wealthy widow who has an assortment of house guests living with her, including her young niece, Dilys.

Once off the quayside Bill realised that the small hours of a bitter February morning was not the ideal time to weave one’s way of out Dunkirk. Presumably there had been roads between the rubble heaps and undoubtedly, before the holocaust, they’d lead somewhere. But now there was nothing but a maze of treacherous, pot-holed tracks meandering aimlessly between a network of railway-lines and flattened buildings.

The beauty of some of these older books is the setting and very often with the British Library Crime Classics, the effects and disruption of war forms the backdrop. Martin Edwards wrote the introduction to Death on the Riviera and said,

‘Setting mattered to Bude, and he began his career with mysteries located in attractive parts of England such as Cornwall, the Lake’s District, the Sussex Downs, and Cheltenham. After the Second World War, at a time of rationing and austerity, he recognised that readers hungered for a touch of the exotic, and Death on the Riviera was the result.’

Bude’s Detective Meredith isn’t a lone ranger like some other crime investigators in books. He has a great relationship with his counterpart in France and he is willing to listen to his young sidekick who is instrumental in helping to solve some key issues in the investigation.
Freddy falls in love while covering this investigation and although Meredith pulls him into line at times and jokes at his expense, he is sympathetic to the young man. It’s a good relationship.
Bude also gives some pertinent cues in this story, which I only picked up afterwards! (I’d make a lousy detective  Like this one when Bill was allowed over the French border:

Inwardly he heaved a sigh of relief. It was not that he had anything to declare, but there was one object aboard the car that might have caused comment. And once interest had been aroused an explanation might have been demanded…

Now, what was it??

In Meredith’s opinion he was faced with one of the toughest problems of his long and arduous career. Lashings of information. A plethora of first-rate clues. Evidence galore. And not a single theory on which to base the next phase of his investigation.Another pleasure for me is coming across obsolete or rarely use words. I think I’ve come across this phrase in one of Bude’s other books: ‘ack emma,’ which is a military term meaning before noon. (e.g. ‘between the hours of two and six-thirty ack emma yesterday morning.’)

Death on the Riviera is a good introduction to Bude’s crime novels. Like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, he isn’t surprised by evil, and although he understands why some people commit murder, and may feel compassion for their situation, he doesn’t let this interfere with his pursuit of justice.
I think Death on the Riviera would be a good introduction to John Bude’s work. It’s not as technically complicated as some of his other stories and the setting is great.

Within the next half-hour, it was more than possible that his investigations would be at an end…
And it wouldn’t be easy, he realised, to take leave of this sunlit, sparkling coast with its terraced vineyards and olive groves, its palms and oleanders, its fantastic cacti, its mimosa scented streets and impossibly blue seas. He thought of Old Kent Road on a wet February night and shuddered.

Fortunately for Bude and his readers, this observation took place on pg. 88 and there are still 154 pages left until the end.  

The Battle of the Villa Fiorita by Rumer Godden (1963)

The Battle of the Villa Fiorita written by Rumer Godden (1907-1998) is partly autobiographical. When her first marriage ended in divorce and she later remarried, there were difficulties between her two daughters and her second husband. This situation was fictionalised in The Battle of the Villa Fiorita.

In this book, the two children of Fanny and Darrell Clavering, Hugh aged fourteen and Caddie aged eleven, are uprooted when their mother abandons them and runs off to Italy with a film director. Up until that time Fanny had been a dependable and solid person whose life revolved around her home and family. Her husband was a colonel in the British Army and worked hard to provide for his family. They lived in a large, slightly shabby, but comfortable home. Colonel Clavering may have been a little dull and ordinary compared to the sophisticated Rob Quillet, but he was honourable and steady. 

The children had been away at boarding school when their mother met Quillet at a dinner party she reluctantly attended on her own because her husband was away on an assignment. Quillet was attracted to her right away. She was a homely and gentle sort of woman and that's what he wanted in a wife. He didn't seem to be worried that she was already someone else's wife.

Fanny wasn’t unhappy with her life but Quillet ‘stole her heart.’ On a couple of occasions, at the beginning of their relationship, Fanny’s conscience cautioned her but she ignored the warnings. The relationship developed quickly and she ended up going to Italy with Quillet where he planned to marry her when her divorce came through.
What they didn’t realise was that Fanny’s two children decided that they would find their way to Italy and bring their mother back home. Rumer Godden portrayed the feelings and thoughts of both the adults and the children caught up in this situation so poignantly. Fanny had been the busy mother running her home essentially on her own at times. Darrell understood that loneliness had played a part in the affair and he behaved very magnanimously, considering the circumstances.

Although I didn’t want to, I felt some compassion for Quillet’s circumstances, especially as his intention was not a quick fling. He wanted to marry Fanny. And then there were the children. Quillet had a ten year old daughter from his first marriage. His wife had died not long after the girl’s birth and she was brought up by her grandmother. Like the two Clavering children, she determined to undermine this new relationship.
I wondered all the way through how this story could end. There could be no winners in this battle of duty versus feelings.

In her preface to the book, Rumer Godden wrote:

“The Battle of the Villa Fiorita was written because I had grown tired of the innumerable novels about child victims of divorce.
‘Let’s have a book where the children will not be victims but fight back,’ I thought and, in the book, the children, a school-aged boy and girl, instead of going miserably back to school, run away to Italy where their mother had absconded with a film director, determined to fetch her back. No book of mine has been more unpopular, especially in America.”

I can understand why this was the case. It was 1963 and divorce was no where near as common as it is now. I imagine, too, that stories of this nature were a little unusual back then.
Although the author says that the children would not be victims, they were. They were desperately unhappy and life would never be the same again. They had lost their home because their father couldn’t manage the place on his own as well as work, and they had to move into a pokey flat in London.

Fanny was happy with her decision until her children turned up in Italy. Before her children arrived she had submerged her guilt and was enjoying her freedom. But being around children made her very uncomfortable:

‘Now and again she would come on a procession of toddlers, little boys, pale-faced, in blue pinafores and peaked caps, from the Colonia Infantile to which children were brought from the slums of Milan; every day they paraded solemnly down to the harbour, walking two by two, each child holding on to the tail of the pinafore of the one in front. Fanny always walked quickly past them, as she walked past the children playing in the piazza, the babies feeding the pigeons on the steps of the church.’

When Fanny questioned the ‘honesty’ of wearing a wedding ring before she and Quillet married. His reply was:

‘If a public promise, before witnesses, to put it at its least, makes all that difference to you, I have to remind you that you have already given that promise to Darrell.’

I can’t say that the subject matter of The Battle of the Villa Fiorita was ‘enjoyable.’ My reaction to the book was in keeping with my experience of coming from a broken home where the break-up solved nothing and really messed up the everyone's lives, particularly the children’s.
I think Godden, having been through a divorce and re-marriage herself, although in quite different circumstances, presented a realistic and thoughtful portrayal of the situation.

Elizabeth Goudge's book, The Pilgrim's Inn, offers a different scenario where a woman in a similar situation makes a decision to put duty before passion and is faced with working this out in daily life. Not a popular idea in our 'me first' society, where feelings trump promises and commitment, but one in which children are protected. I think that if my parents had had a way to work through their feelings; if they'd had some sort of guidance; if their feelings hadn't overwhelmed other considerations, it would have been better for all involved. It wouldn't have been easy, but neither were their lives after the initial feeling of freedom when the consequences of their decisions were apparent.