Book Review: ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

A rave review in the New York Times Book Review of "The Whalebone Theatre," first novel by British writer Joanna Quinn, made me eager to score a copy and plunge into it. And I was not disappointed. Though I also believe this brilliant and fabulously inventive novel could have been even better.

It was, as touted, a sort of Dickensian throwback, an historical novel overstuffed with plot and colorfully eccentric characters. A bounteous cornucopia of a novel, the kind that—in our era of solipsistic literary navel-gazing—has become something of an endangered species. As the book begins, it's 1928. And 12 year old Cristabel Seagrave, "an orphan with a tendency towards intensity," finds a dead whale on the beach… But wait—what beach? And orphaned how? It's obvious we must have backstory. And Ms. Quinn obliges with a series of jump-cuts (each chapter conveniently dated, beginning eight years earlier); it will be 100 pages before the whale again makes its soggy entrance.

Sketched in broad strokes, it's the story of all the Seagraves, a somewhat down-at-heelfamily of landed gentry, during the quarter century between the ends of the First and Second World Wars. At least half the book is centered around Chilcombe, the family's equally run-down estate, situated on England's southern coast, in a wild area historically infested with smugglers, in the county of Dorset (from whence Ms. Quinn herself hails). But Cristabel Seagrave is indeed the center of things. Four years old and motherless as the story proper begins (said mother having died birthing her), and neglected by her father and his new, much younger bride, she is stubborn, independent, and dauntingly precocious. She is also obsessed by stories, her favorite being the "Iliad"; readers who find the thought of a four-year-old relishing Homer's tale (as haltingly read aloud by Cristabel's semi-literate teenaged maid, Maudie Kitcat) less charmingly whimsical than off-puttingly incredible, should perhaps reach for another book. 

Cristabel has been given to understand that her young stepmother was acquired so that she, Cristabel, should acquire a brother. Perceiving the sound of a squalling infant one day, she quizzes Maudie:

"The brother—“ Cristabel begins, but Maudie cuts her off with a shake of her head.

"It's a girl. Big one."

Cristabel sits down on the wooden stairs, frowning. "Are they sure?"

"Face like your father's, but it's a girl all right. Mrs. Seagrave hasn't taken to it.

Says it looks like a vegetable."

"You said they'd try again if it wasn't a boy."

"They will. That's why she's here.”

The baby is duly nicknamed "the Veg" (which she will remain until, nearing adolescence, she insists on reclaiming her real name, Flossie). As for the stepmother, at the advanced age of 23 Rosalind Seagrave had considered herself lucky to acquire even a dubiously suitable husband from a male population lately decimated by war—the war that Jasper Seagrave, afflicted from childhood with a lame leg, was forced to sit out. But Jasper's chilly indifference to his new wife is of a piece with Chilcombe's wild and forbidding bleakness. So the arrival of Willoughby, Jasper's rakish younger brother (a hero of the war, natch) in a shiny new motorcar sets up a turn of plot somewhat predictable, but nonetheless deliciously played out.

Soon Willoughby and Rosalind are doing their bit to bring the Roaring 20's to musty old Chilcombe, with a series of louche all-night parties. They also begin burning through the estate's depleted funds (Rosalind ordering lavishly from illustrated catalogues, Willoughby purchasing an aeroplane on a lark). Jasper's predictable outrage, in concert with his priggishness and clear distaste for both wife and progeny, have made him the book's equally predictable villain. So it's rather a shock when Ms. Quinn takes a couple of chapters to flesh out Jasper's past, especially his courtship of Cristabel's mother, Annabel Agnew, a brisk, no-nonsense, hoydenish horsewoman. She takes shy, repressed Jasper in hand (rather as one would a balky horse), they marry—and the reader abruptly realizes that Jasper's consuming love for the woman who bore Cristabel is the source of his inability to care for either the child who killed her, or Annabel's frivolous young replacement.

It's a neat trick, turning an ogre into a sympathetic, even tragic, character. But during this explanatory interlude, the book's sparkling effervescence abruptly evaporates; the change of tone is disconcerting, and presages another (and much more extended) shift in tone in the book's second half.

But meanwhile Jasper's death in a riding accident sets the remaining characters (and author) free to loosen the last stays of propriety's corset and indulge their every whim. In short order Rosalind and her brother-in-law wed; by claiming the baby born a few months later arrived "a bit early," they are able to pass it off as Willoughby's (which indeed it is, though its conception clearly predates Jasper's demise).

Thus now-fully-orphaned Cristabel finally acquires her long-awaited (step)brother, Digby, born to play an oversize part in the book's drama—and many other dramas as well. Jump-cut a half-dozen years to Digby's first appearance in the book, coinciding with the reappearance of that momentous whale. Cristabel immediately claims it by planting a flag atop its carcass. She is now 12, the Veg 8, Digby 6; Frannie, Zooey and Seymour Glass have nothing on these precociously articulate kids, as the ensuing droll dialogue (for which Ms. Quinn has a decided gift) makes clear:

"What a beauty." [says Digby]

"Isn't he," grins Cristabel.

"It's like I'm having a dream, only I'm awake. A whale on our beach. Did you claim

him, Crista? Oh, you did! You took the flag!"

"Remembered in the nick of time, Digs. Tell me, what's afoot back at the house?

Are your parents awake?"

"The situation remains uncertain," says Digby...

And a few minutes later:

"Mr. Brewer, I need you to alert the authorities," says Cristabel. "I have claimed

a whale for the Seagrave family."

"So I see, Miss Cristabel. Do you have any plans for it?"

Cristabel and Digby exchange glances. "We will preserve it for the annals of

history," says Cristabel.

"We will make famous the name of Seagrave," adds Digby, patting the whale

appreciatively.

"We will examine its innards for science."

"We will put it on display so all may come and wonder."

[Following a few more such sallies]:

"Poor Whale, says the Veg, under her breath.

The whale's reappearance ushers in a raft of whimsically eccentric characters, some seemingly disgorged by the sea itself:

Cristabel sees "children climbing over their whale. Four or five children scrambling over its carcass like crabs, and they are naked as savages, their bare flesh shining in the sunlight. Cristabel glares fiercely at them…

The Veg, red-faced and astonished, whispers, "What are they doing?” But there is more astonishment to come. For at that moment they hear a booming voice coming from the sea. A bearded man is standing in the surf, and he too is missing his clothes....For a moment, Cristabel believes it is the god Poseidon, come from the briny depths to take them away in his chariot..."

Enter Taras Gregorevich Kovalsky: mad artist, Slavic sensualist, defiantly free spirit, walking cliche. But he serves his purpose, casting a spell over the Seagrave household, collecting a bevy of female retainers (this time not from the sea but seemingly out of thin air), including a proto-hippyish American poetess named Myrtle, a sort of St. Vincent Millay knock-off.

Whereas most of Taras's progeny remain a nameless, sexually indeterminate swarm, the eldest, a boy named Leon, is worldly beyond his years, and a font of often shocking information. Determinedly picking his brains, Cristabel learns that Taras shares his bed (in the cottage which they have commandeered) with not one, but two women—neither of whom is Leon's mother; discernible in the rather prickly exchanges between sulky, blase Leon and unsmiling, relentlessly inquisitive Cristabel, is an embryonic sexual heat.

In fact all three Seagrave siblings are precociously knowledgeable about adult matters usually veiled from childish eyes; a droll chapter entitled "Facts Learnt by the Children," with the subtitle WHEN THEY CREEP OUT OF BED AND CONCEAL THEMSELVES BEHIND THE COATS IN THE SMALL CLOAKROOM BEHIND THE MAIN STAIRCASE IN THE OAK HALL DURING THAT NIGHT'S DINNER PARTY, includes the following numbered items:

6. Willoughby believes that the finest minds were lost in the war. What's left, he claims, are the ridiculous so-called Bright Young Things bed-hopping around London wearing each other's clothes and buggering each other.

7. There is something called buggering.

Meanwhile Taras has cajoled Cristabel into becoming the theatre director she was obviously born to be, and the entire estate—children, adults, servants, bohemian hangers-on—is enlisted to bring her beloved "Iliad" (with a script penned by herself), to dramatic life. Taras paints the scenery, a stuffed and moth-eaten baby elephant impersonates the Trojan horse, and the age and gender-blind casting includes Rosalind as Helen, Flossie as Hector, Taras as a booming and alarmingly virile Achilles, and six year old Digby as Paris. The whale's ribs are arrayed in front of the cottage to form some sort of proscenium (I found this a bit difficult to visualize), and elaborate invitations are sent out to all the other gentry in the vicinity (a contingent up to now unmentioned). The performance is a crashing success, with Digby's precocious thespian prowess especially noted…

And it is here that those with a low tolerance for whimsy may once again be tempted to toss the book aside, especially when the Whalebone Theatre becomes such a going concern that it spawns a decade of successful productions. But sticklers for believability should fight the urge to abandon ship. Because that decade passes in a flash; a series of newspaper clippings, lauding the WBT's productions of "The Tempest," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," et al, stand in for the March of Time (and culminate in Digby's towering portrayal of a 16 year old Hamlet). At which point we have arrived at the outbreak of the Second World War—and the second half of what often seems a very different book.

Let me say at once, it's quite as wonderful a book. And in her depiction of how the Seagrave siblings' lives are upended and consumed by the war, Ms. Quinn has clearly done her homework. It's all there: the buzz bombs, blackouts, and culinary deprivations, as well as the tedious military training that eventually leads to Cristabel and Digby's separate deployment as agents aiding the French resistance (I neglected to mention that—courtesy of their longtime live-in French tutor, another quickly sketched but memorably tart creation—the siblings are all perfectly fluent in French).

It's territory already well-trod by such literary lionesses as Sara Waters and Kate Atkinson, and I thought Ms. Quinn would bring her own special gifts to bear with scenes pushing the boundary of the believable--perhaps Cristabel or Digby would use their dramatic skills to infiltrate the German high command? But everything from desperate midnight parachute jumps into Nazi-occupied France to the gut-wrenching suspense of waiting in line for one's papers to be examined by the Gestapo are portrayed with patently well-researched authenticity.  Thankfully, the Seagrave siblings remain their quirky, loveable selves, as a letter from Cristabel to the now fully grown Leon Kovalsky delightfully demonstrates:

Leon, 

Generous though it was of you to offer to relieve me of my virginity before Adolf

kills us all, I'm afraid you have made several assumptions that cannot go unchallenged.

One: that I still have it. Two: that if I do still have it, I would share that information

with you. Three: that if I do still have it, I wish to dispense with it. Four: that if I do

still have it and wish to dispense with it, I would consider you a suitable candidate…

Neither is Flossie, taking care of the Homefront, neglected, and her tenderly depicted almost-romance with one of the German prisoners laboring in Chilcombe's now vastly expanded farming operation is one of the book's highlights.

But the freedom in which Ms. Quinn had clearly reveled, in concocting Chilcombe's menagerie of eccentrics, has fled. Perhaps that's because no research was needed: mix "Brideshead Revisited," "Upstairs-Downstairs," "Downton Abbey," add a dash of Dickens, and shake well. But the author's sudden preference for gritty realism over flights of fancy clips her imaginative wings, and the book turns much darker. One could argue that's exactly the point—the war did indeed make the world a much darker place, and it's no spoiler to reveal that more than one major character will die before the book's end.

Yet my inability to refrain from extensively quoting from pages and pages of wonderful writing belies any reservations I have about the book's ultimate cohesion. And I will eagerly read anything at all this extravagantly talented writer turns her hand to.