Well — now you can head
for not-old Joanna Quinn’s
The Whalebone Theatre, which
has its roots in exactly that
sort of soil, but comes with
an unexpected 21st-century
sensibility so that it feels
modern rather than homage-
like and is bursting with
energy and zip.
Honestly, I want to
sound a trumpet and put out
some flags. It is pure heaven
from first word to last. It’s a
debut novel, incredibly for
something so assured and
fully realised, although it did
take the author something
like ten years to write.
We open in 1919. Our
heroine is Cristabel Seagrave,
aged three, lonely and
unloved, but fierce of spirit.
Her mother has died in
childbirth, her father is the
essence of the stuffy,
repressed upper-class
Englishman and her home is
a well-worn Dorset pile with
“an elephantine air of weary
grandeur” called Chilcombe.
Cristabel is waiting for the
arrival of her new mummy,
Rosalind, who is too young
and pretty for poor
constipated middle-aged
Jasper, but considers herself
fortunate to have nabbed him
because all the bright young
men have died in the war. She
dreams of glittering parties full
of cocktails and witty repartee,furious wife brings up
all the children and does
all the housework. There
is a stranded whale and the
theatre of the title. And
eventually there is the
Second World War and
the falling away of whatever
frail certainties might have
existed at Chilcombe.
Quinn’s writing throughout
is... the word I keep coming
back to is “generous”. It’s
as though she had made the
reader the most lavish and
delicious cake, with layers of
cream and so much fruit that
it spills out on to the plate.
Although a cake perhaps
suggests a cloying sweetness.
There is no cloying; this is
lucid storytelling. Here is the
world, Quinn seems to say, in
all its glory and misery, its tiny
little joys and its great dollops
of pain — all of it valuable and
there for the taking, to make
of what you will.
The Whalebone Theatre is
one of those books that has
you hooting with laughter
one minute (although the
laughter is never unkind,
which is a whole other skill;
you never snigger) and feeling
absolutely floored the next,
not just because of the
meanderings of the plot or
Quinn’s acute emotional
intelligence, but because she is
one of those writers who has
her finger on humanity’s pulse.
An absolute treat of a book, to
be read and reread. cFICTION
India Knight
The Whalebone Theatre
by Joanna Quinn
Fig Tree £14.99 pp560
If you were to think about
fiction as you do interiors,
the latest trend might be
compared to sparse, angular
furniture positioned with a
great degree of care in large,
echoey grey-white rooms. The
light is beautiful. Everything
is impeccably considered
— curated, even, so that a lone
cushion seems imbued with
meaning. Unsmiling people
waft about looking beautiful,
and perhaps more intense
than the occasion requires.
The older observer finds it all
ravishing — so pared down,
so elegant — but notes that
there’s nowhere comfortable
to sit and after a while their
bottom starts to hurt.
And then some books are
like a squishy velvet sofa, or
an insanely comfortable
double bed (brass, probably),
gaily piled high with
eiderdowns and pillows.
This last species of book
— generous, filling, deeply
satisfying funny-sad, every
page crammed with life
and experience — has been
thin on the ground recently.
The genre is not fashionable.
If you like huge casts of
characters, romance, comedy,
tragedy, history, families and
detail so rich that you can
exactly picture everyone
and everything that happens
on the page, you head for
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The
Cazalet Chronicles or Mary
Wesley, among others, which
is to say for a particular
20th-century kind of novel,
more often than not written
by an older woman.
ALAMYA novel to
match the
Cazalet saga
but instead wafts through
empty rooms as the Seagrave
ancestors gaze dustily down.
Neither Rosalind nor her
new husband is interested
in sturdy, clever, unbiddable
little Cristabel — no one is
except for Maudie, one of
the maids — and nor are they
interested in each other.
Happily, or not, Jasper has a
dashing, daredevil war hero
younger brother, Willoughby.
Rosalind produces a daughter
— “It’s a girl. Big one. Face like
your father’s,” Cristabel is told
by Maudie — called Florence,
but referred to as the Veg,
then a son, prettier, called
Digby. Surrounded by
bewildering and distant
adults, alone in the middle
of nowhere, possessed of
spirit and imagination, the
siblings love each other
passionately, and Cristabel
becomes their leader.
The novel follows the
children through their lives.
So much happens. There is
death and there are births.
There are scandals and
affairs, heartbreak, longing,
a brilliant description of the
long, slow fade of love based
on desire, and a devastating
explanation of why Jasper isas he is. (I have never read a
more moving description
of how and why a sweet
little boy might turn into
a pompous prig. Quinn is
superb at explaining broken
hearts of all types, and hearts
generally.) There are two
escapee It girls who share a
Russian lover while his poor,I want to
sound a
trumpet. This
is pure heaven
from first
word to last
Elizabeth Jane Howard gets a modern
rival in this wonderful period drama
Between the wars Fishermen
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Joseph Edward Southall29 May 2022 35