The Whalebone Theatre: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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The blub on my copy led me to believe the story would be about Cristabel and her beached whale, that there would be spying adventures, and some Nazi-punching. That wasn’t really what I got. I got the story of three kids who don’t fit in, who grow up in an eccentric household and who define themselves through this and through how they will live through the war. This is very interesting, and well executed as we follow Crista, her half-sister Flossie and “cousin” Digby through those few years. In what ways does war, and generally the threat of death, create the conditions for love to blossom throughout the novel? Consider the relationships between Rosalind and Jasper (and Willoughby), Cristabel and Leon, Flossie and George, and Digby and Jean-Marc. Which of those pairs do you think would have been possible in other contexts? Women take on various responsibilities in the war --- on the field and at home, and yet as Perry says of the female spies, “If we circulate the details of women agents in an effort to find them, it means admitting they were there” (536). How does this reflect the general attitude toward women throughout the timeframe of the novel? How do the main women --- Cristabel, Rosalind, Flossie --- defy being forgotten in the way that establishments might want them to be?

If you’ve enjoyed Mary Wesley’s and Nancy Mitford’s novels, then you are going to love ‘The Whalebone Theatre’. Telling the story of a landowning family with the habit of collecting bohemian hangers-on over the first half of the twentieth century, at the centre of the narrative is Christabel Seagrave, an ‘odd’ little girl who becomes a teenage amateur theatre director and then a ‘Clerk Special Duties’ during WW2. It is Taras who encourages Cristabel to cultivate her artistic inclinations and put on a play. This initiates one of the book’s themes of play-acting, which runs right through from Rosalind, valiantly pretending to be a happy wife and mother, to the English agents in the second world war, when a far more serious pretence is required from those parachuted in to occupied France. Quinn hammers this home a little too hard at times – “My new uniform is quite the best costume I’ve ever worn,” Digby writes in 1939 – but it’s a pleasing device.However, Quinn never pushes the idea far enough to make the reader catch her breath – and that’s the weakness of the novel, which despite its engaging storytelling cannot match the likes of models such as Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles or Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. Quinn simply doesn’t take enough risks. She has her characters narrate in turn, which means they have no secrets from us; she makes them likable, with few hidden resentments or schemes. The older generation don’t alter as they age, dropping out of the narrative as they cease to be interesting. The younger ones are better treated in that they mature and undergo life-altering challenges; but the main driver of tension in their story comes from historical events. My ideal novel . . . Quinn creates a worldso rich with observation, detail, humanity, and heartthat you are incapable of doing anything butdrinking it in with greedy delight.” — YOU magazine But as the children grow to adulthood, another story has been unfolding in the wings. And when the war finally takes centre stage, they find themselves cast, unrehearsed, into roles they never expected to play.

Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced. Just absolutely wonderful . . . It is so doggone readable, and you really care about these characters . . . The book just really keeps you reading.” Rosalind had no love for her firstborn, a daughter. "... it looks like a vegetable...but at least she will have a film star name...Florence." An heir was what everyone wanted...boys could drive motors...be interested in snails, maps and warfare. Finally, a son and heir...Digby.I don’t think they’d care. If you were good, and I know you would be, they wouldn’t even notice you were a woman.’ What’s remarkable, especially for a first novel, is Quinn’s deft way of depicting this lost world—whether a subsiding seaside aristocracy or a training school for British agents or a Parisian theater in wartime . . . Her vision is so fine and fully realized that it’s hard to imagine her doing anything else—and hard to have to wait to see what that might be.” — Washington Post But that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Either they notice I’m a woman, and they don’t want me because of that, or I have to hope they somehow don’t notice, which leaves me eradicated either way.’

Alongside her story are also woven the lives of her half-sister and brother, although the latter is no blood relation. Joanna Quinn gives detailed depictions of their Chilcombe estate, the evacuation of Dunkirk and the Blitz in London to name a few settings as she takes us through the decades. Some of her figurative language is particularly memorable; the London bombings are perceived as ‘…a production set, and the scenery keeps changing. It is a production set, and the cast are here one day, gone the next. Only the sky is lit up, criss-crossed with movie-star searchlights while air raid warnings slide up and down the scale.’ Cristabel Seagrave and her half/step-siblings, Flossie and Digby, are largely left to bring themselves up during the inter-war years in a country house in Dorset. Tales of adventure fire their imagination, and when a whale is beached near their home, Cristabel claims it for herself and eventually converts its bones into an outdoor theatre. But as WWII approaches, it becomes clear that none of the trio is comfortable in their allocated role and that war might provide opportunities to forge new identities—as long as they can survive. Welcome to Chilcombe, "a many-gabled, many chimneyed, ivy-covered manor house with an elephantine air of weary grandeur...it has huddled on a wooden cliff overhanging the ocean for four hundred years." At this Dorset estate in the year 1919, Cristabel Seagrave awaited the arrival of her new mother, Rosalind, "a poised London debutante." Jasper Seagrave, widower, sought a young wife to provide an heir for Chilcombe. After the Great War and a shortage of suitable husbands, Rosalind settled for Jasper.Rosalind enters Chilcombe as a veritable outsider --- upon her arrival on the first day of 1920, we learn that “Rosalind feels pinned beneath the sheets of the marital bed.... She is fixed in place. An exhibit.... Jasper believes she will become familiar with her marital duties in time. She will become familiar with the unfamiliar” (11). How does the establishment of the Whalebone Theatre integrate her in the family in a new, even unexpected way? What do you think would have been different about how the family and estate went through the war had she not died? This book is possibly one of the most atmospheric I've read in a long time. It is beautifully written. The prose is LYRICAL. But if you expect to read it in a weekend, you're going to find it impossible for three reasons.

Maar om een of andere reden zakt het verhaal soms als borrelend en bubbelend walvisvlees in elkaar. Om dan weer op te veren en de lezer mee te sleuren in een kleurrijk spektakel van roaring interbellum-decadentie en adellijk hedonisme. This is a story of three children, Cristabel, her half-sister Flossie and Digby, their cousin and cousin/half-brother respectively, who live in a big house in Devon in the 1920s. Charismatic, orphaned Cristabel, is their leader and the centre of their world of play and make-believe; she is strong, self-sufficient, imaginative. The first half of this novel is an engaging, vivid narrative around children and adults (rich, bohemian, intelligent, silly...) which is quite a delight to read. The Whalebone Theatre of the title is constructed before our very eyes - a whale comes to die at the beach and this image of death and regeneration (the dead animal becoming the literal bones of their theatre) is meant to have a resonance throughout the novel.There are moments when we get a glimpse of something more invigorating. Digby has a heart-to-heart with an officer who, after a pause, tells him: “I have a friend. A radio operator. He’s stationed up in Orkney. I miss him very much.” For a brief moment, a door opens and we get a spark of the electricity Sarah Waters generated in her wartime novel, The Night Watch. But here, Digby is flummoxed and Quinn lets the tension dissolve into nothing. Similarly, a certain tendresse between one of her characters and a German PoW echoes the febrile relationship in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, but doesn’t attain its perilous intensity. Like Red Bull, The Whalebone Theatre gives you wings. You fly from 1919 to 1945, from a dusty old house in Dorset where debutantes dance underneath stuffed deer heads to the oily sea off Dunkirk, where German Stukas whizz over fishing boats. Now we’re in a velvety West End theatre watching Diaghilev’s dancers leap and spin; now we’re plunging through the moonlight over occupied France as a parachute unfurls silently above a secret agent like a big white lily.