The Saturday Morning Post (No. 78)

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A reread this week. I first read this book probably in the late 1970's. It's a sea story and something of a spy story as well. My Penguin copy calls it "The Classic Spy Thriller."

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers  A-

I have very fond memories of this book. This is probably the third time I've read the entire book. I've read the first chapter several more times, as I feel that it is a quintessential example of what I most enjoy in British writing - cleaver and witty, and at least to me, it makes the London of the last century come alive.

This is the only novel Erskine Childers wrote. I was written in 1903 as propaganda disguised as fiction. It was meant as a warning to a complacent Great Britain about the growing ambitions of Imperial Germany, and the vulnerability of the country to a German invasion in a near future war. Ironically, Childers was executed in 1922 by a British firing squad despite being awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for his services to intelligence in the air and on the sea in World War I.  He was executed during the Irish Troubles as an active advocate of Irish independence for possession of small revolver, after he shock the hands of each man of the firing party. Suffice to say he was an interesting man.

The story involves the first person narrator, Carruthers, being invited to join an old university friend, Arthur Davies, on his "yacht" then residing in on the German Baltic coast. Carruthers, working for the British Foreign Office, had his holiday plans disrupted, and stuck in the dead season of London, was unable to attend the house parties he had been invited to. When he was finally able to get away, he had no place to go, so he took up Davies' offer and decamped for the Baltic. What he finds is something unexpected. The yacht is not what he expected. It turns out that Davies had hidden reasons for inviting him, including a theory that he had almost stumbled upon something so secret that the German agents would stop at nothing to keep him from finding out the secret in the sands. 

There are four maps in my addition of the book, and I always love books with maps. The one above shows the general area where most of the action takes place. This is very much a sea story. Childers in real life loved to mess around in boats, and his expertise is on full display in this story of Davies and Carruthers' adventures exploring the tidal sands behind the offshore islands shown on the map, looking for the secret the Germans wanted to keep from Davies when he was first visited there without Carruthers.

I will say this, on this reread, at my age, and knowing the story as I do, this read slower than my first read. And I have since read a number of authors with similar pro-British Empire sentiments from that time period. There is a certain ethos in the writing that has the heroes careless of their lives - it's the doing of it for whatever reason that it's important, and they don't care a snap of their fingers if they die doing it. I guess I've grown too old and cynical these days for me to fully buy that idea anymore. 

I don't know just who I can recommend this to. It is a mystery/adventure/sea story, written 120 years ago, and that shows. But I would recommend looking it up on Amazon and reading the first chapter of the Kindle version. I think that's a masterpiece of British writing.