Review of The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn, pub. Penguin 2022

“Édouard asks if she knows the French phrase les enfants perdus – the lost children. She shakes her head. ‘I think of it often,’ he says. ‘It has a military meaning. It describes a small troop who volunteer to make a dangerous attack. To go first. In Dutch, it is verloren hoop. In English, forlorn hope.”

Quite apart from the military meaning of “les enfants perdus”, it would make a good epigraph for a novel much concerned with inadequate parenting and the way it repeats itself down generations. At its centre are three half-siblings, Cristabel, Flossie and Digby Seagrave, growing up between the wars in an old country house in Dorset. Cristabel is the daughter of Jasper and his first wife, who died at the child’s birth. Flossie is the daughter of Jasper and his second wife Rosalind. Jasper himself dies when the girls are young, not that they notice much difference as he paid them no attention. Rosalind then marries Jasper’s brother Willoughby so Digby, their son, is Flossie’s half-brother and Cristabel’s cousin.

All three of the adult Seagraves, in different ways, are bad parents, and much of their inadequacy in this line stems from the poor parenting they themselves experienced. Samuel Butler’s solution to this, in The Way of All Flesh, was to have his hero break the chain by opting out of parenthood altogether. One of the siblings does this, and another looks like doing so by the end of the novel. Yet people also are their parents, even as they conflict with them, as Cristabel at one point keenly realises:

“As his voice echoes about the theatre, Cristabel hears his father in him – Willoughby’s warm story-telling baritone – as if Digby briefly embodied an older version of himself. Having not seen him for so long, she now seems to be seeing different versions of him, some familiar, some strange. Past and present and future Digby.”

This theatre, a space made from the bones of a dead whale in which they stage amateur productions, mostly of Shakespeare, for and involving family and friends, becomes emblematic for the act people put on for others, and the desire for applause which echoes the longing for parental approbation. It’s significant that Cristabel, the orphan who has no parents to impress, also has no ambitions in front of the footlights. Her forte is direction and the most significant acting she will do is in real life, as a spy. She is one of that generation of women for whom World War Two was genuinely liberating, in that it enabled them to do things formerly out of their reach:

“How can it be that she loves this murky, blighted and pockmarked England more than she loved its peaceful green predecessor? Because she can drive a car through it, in a uniform; because she can be with a man in it, without marriage.”

Particularly in its second half, the narrative is a page-turner, whose plot I am naturally not about to give away. But all through, much of the reading pleasure comes from the style. There is a dry, sardonic tone, a little reminiscent of Rose Macaulay, which often surfaces either as humour (“had a brief but SOUL-SHATTERING affair with a Norwegian submariner and couldn’t look at a pickled herring without weeping”) or simply keen observation, as in Rosalind’s reaction to the loss of so many of her beaux in the Great War: “One by one, all the charming boys she had danced with and strolled with and dined with had disappeared. At first, it was awful, and then it was usual, which was worse than awful, but less tiring.”

But the virtues of the writing go deeper than this. Rosalind’s reaction to the Dorset countryside, after living in London, is:

“In London, the outdoors had been tidied up into parks. At dusk, the lamplighters with their long poles would light the gas lamps lining the pathways, golden circles flickering into life across the city. But in Dorset, the darkness descends so completely it is like falling into a coal cellar.”

In itself, this is a subtle piece of observation and place-description, but it also foreshadows a crucial scene later in Rosalind’s life, when London, in the blitz, will look and feel very different: “Every route through the lightless city is now an unpredictable one. It is a shadowy moonscape and the bombs change its shape every night. Landmarks evaporate, streets are roped off, and dust falls over everything.” We haven’t heard the last of that cellar, either…

The period, basically the 1920s. 30s and 40s, is very convincingly evoked, in both the language and the manner of its characters, so much so that the only place where I momentarily blinked was when the author, in the phrase “an elegant young Black man”, uses the modern convention of spelling “black” with a capital B.  That did jar, because at the time when this is set, such a usage would have seemed downright odd. But most of the time, one is thinking how apposite is the phrasing, how perfectly suited to what it is doing – Digby, on the way back to Dunkirk: “Yesterday morning, a German plane came screaming over and the man in front of me shot himself in the head, to save them the bother.” Flossie, gradually getting over a bereavement: “As she works, she considers what she might do with her crops. Betty has a recipe for raspberry shortbread she could try, if she saves up her margarine rations. This imaginative pondering feels as if she is, if not exactly returning to herself, then arranging to meet herself, a little further on.”