I read this book for Mount
TBR Reading Challenge 2019.
The Riddle of the
Sands - Erskine Childers
This early 20th century spy thriller starts
with Charles Carruthers plodding away in the British Foreign Office, marking
time on dull reports and doing the social whirl at balls and dinners. For a
change, he accepts an offer of a vacation from an old Oxford buddy, Arthur
Davies. The stolid quiet Davies proposes duck shooting in the Frisian Islands
on his yacht the Dulcibella. In fact,
to make up for being turned down by the Royal Navy, Davies has taken to
freelance espionage. He is investigating German plans to invade that royal
throne of kings, that sceptered isle.
Though raised near Great Lakes, having lived on an island
for six years, and living now in a place ridden by lake effect snow, I’m not
really a water guy. I just read lots of nautical stories, in memoirs,
serious
fiction, mysteries
and thrillers.
In this novel, the technical information about navigation, sailing and naval
dispositions is balanced by expressive narrative like this:
… A sort of buoyant fatalism
possessed me as I finished my notes and pored over the stove. It upheld me,
too, when I went on deck and watched the 'pretty beat', whose prettiness was
mainly due to the crowd of fog-bound shipping—steamers, smacks, and
sailing-vessels—now once more on the move in the confined fairway of the fiord,
their baleful eyes of red, green, or yellow, opening and shutting, brightening
and fading; while shore-lights and anchor-lights added to my bewilderment, and
a throbbing of screws filled the air like the distant roar of London streets.
In fact, every time we spun round for our dart across the fiord I felt like a
rustic matron gathering her skirts for the transit of the Strand on a busy
night. Davies, however, was the street arab who zigzags under the horses' feet
unscathed; and all the time he discoursed placidly on the simplicity and safety
of night-sailing if only you are careful, obeying rules, and burnt good lights.
As we were nearing the hot glow in the sky that denoted Kiel we passed a huge
scintillating bulk moored in mid-stream. 'Warships,' he murmured, ecstatically.
That second 80-word sentence is, well, something, though
the ~ing verbs make movement, sights, and sounds realistic and vivid.
Historians tell us that the book was a best-seller when
it was published. Public outcry stirred by the book was such that the UK shored
up its coastal defense system. Critics say the book was an influence on John
Buchan, whose man-child hero Richard Hannay calls to mind Davies in this
one. This was Childers’ only novel. He became a stringent Irish Nationalist
(his mother was Irish) and had an unfortunate end after the Great War. His son
was President of Ireland in the early Seventies.
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