Category: 20 Books of Summer

Blog Tour/Book Review: Call of the Curlew by Elizabeth Brooks

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Along with my tour buddy, Novels and NonFiction, I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Call of the Curlew by Elizabeth Brooks.  Many thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the tour and for Hannah Bright at Doubleday for my review copy.  You can read my review of this haunting and atmospheric book below.

Do check out the tour banner at the bottom of this post to see the other great book bloggers taking part in the tour.

Call of the CurlewAbout the Book

Virginia Wrathmell has always known she will meet her death on the marsh.

It’s New Year’s Eve 2015 and eighty-six year old Virginia Wrathmell feels like the end is upon her. As she looks out on the dark and desolate marshes that surround the house she’s lived in since she was young, Virginia is overcome with the memories of one winter that have stayed with her since childhood.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1939 and Virginia is eleven, an orphan arriving to meet her new parents at their mysterious house, Salt Winds, on the edge of a vast marsh. War feels far away out here amongst the birds and shifting sands – until the day a German fighter plane crashes into the marsh. The people at Salt Winds are the only ones to see it.

When her adopted father goes missing, and a mysterious stranger arrives in his place, Salt Winds becomes a very dangerous place to be. Virginia’s failure to protect the house’s secrets will leave her spending a lifetime dealing with the aftermath.

“The wind has dropped, but every now and then a gust will shiver in from the sea, carrying some fragment – a feather, a straw, a grain of sand, the scent of snow, the dainty bone of a bird – by way of an offering to the house.”

From the author:

“The location, Tollbury Marsh, came to me first, the story second. The marsh is a place on the edge of normal life, which seems flat and accessible to the uninitiated, but is actually full of dangers. I wanted to capture the strong and pervasive sense of place that I felt when reading The Woman in Black and Great Expectations.”

Format: Hardcover, ebook (320 pp.)    Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 28th June 2018                      Genre: Historical Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Call of the Curlew on Goodreads

My Review

Somehow it doesn’t seem quite right that I’ve been reading Call of the Curlew sitting in my garden in the bright sunshine.  The atmosphere of the book is such that it seems more suited to misty autumn nights, with the rain lashing down outside and the wind rattling the window panes.  Throw in some creaking floorboards, some footsteps in the attic and your reading experience would be complete.

Told in chapters that alternate between 2015 and the early years of the Second World War, Call of the Curlew has a haunting, mysterious quality.  Salt Winds, the old house at which orphan Virginia arrives in 1939 to join her adoptive parents, Lorna and Clem, occupies an isolated position on the marshes at the end of a long lane.

The author really gets inside the mind of ten-year old Virginia.  Initially, she’s concerned that she might be a disappointment to Lorna and Clem and be sent back to the orphanage (although she doesn’t think they do sale and return).  Virginia doesn’t understand everything she sees and hears in the house but she’s sensitive to the tension she detects between Lorna and Clem.  ‘Virginia liked it when they discussed everyday things: pots of tea and food prices and what needed doing in the garden.  It made them sound peaceful and close.  Anything bigger or more personal and they were on edge, like a couple of cats.’  Underlying everything, there’s an air of mystery, of secrets and things that can’t be spoken about.

Virginia also has a child’s literal interpretation of Clem’s warnings about the perils of setting foot on the marsh and the dangers that wait because of the shifting tides.  Virginia forms a touching relationship with Clem who seems better able to communicate with a child than Lorna.  Virginia’s relationship with Lorna is strained; Lorna always remains slightly distant and less openly affectionate.  Virginia has also acquired an acute sense of how to deal with certain situations: ‘Shutting up was almost always a clever move, she’d discovered, not just with Clem but with everyone.  People rarely object to a quiet child.’

From the very first time, Max Deering, a childhood friend of Clem, visits Salt Winds, ten-year old Virginia takes an instinctive dislike to him, sensing something unsettling about him she can’t put into words.  Her view of Max can’t help but affect the reader’s view of him, especially as the manner of his arrivals at the house conjured up thoughts for me of Mrs Danvers gliding in and out of shot in Hitchcock’s film version of Rebecca.  Virginia muses: ‘It was difficult to explain the car’s pull on her imagination – not without sounding silly – but there was something about its predatory grace that made it seem like a living thing.  The lane from Tollbury Point to Salt Winds was pitted with holes and bumps, but Mr Deering’s Austin 12 never seemed to mind. It just glided forwards, silent and slow, the way a shark glides over the ocean floor.’ 

I loved the author’s evocative, imaginative descriptions and eye for the smallest details when depicting a scene.   For example, as Virginia makes meticulous plans in response to what she believes is the sign she’s been waiting for, ‘She pictures the house, room by room, and plots the route of her farewell tour, mentally circling certain parts and crossing others out.’    Don’t you just love the idea of the ‘farewell tour’.  Or this description of the kitchen table: ‘The old tabletop rolled between them like a parchment map, grainy with longitude lines and knotty islands and uncharted territories.’  I can almost feel that under my fingers.

As the book progresses, it becomes apparent that some sort of tragedy occurred at Salt Winds which has haunted Virginia for the rest of her life and for which she feels, justifiably or not, responsible and for which she is convinced she will someday be called to make amends.  The enjoyment for the reader is finding out exactly the nature of the tragic event and the consequences that follow.

I thought the book was fabulous.  To my mind, in Call of the Curlew, Elizabeth Brooks gives Susan Hill (think The Woman in Black) and Sarah Waters (think The Little Stranger) a run for their money when it comes to creating a creepy, unsettling atmosphere.  I was also reminded at times of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and there is no higher praise in my book (pardon the pun).

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Doubleday, and Random Things Tours, in return for an honest and unbiased review.  Call of the Curlew is one of my 20 Books of Summer.

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In three words: Spooky, atmospheric, haunting

Try something similar…The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde by Eve Chase (read my review here)

Elizabeth BrooksAbout the Author

ELIZABETH BROOKS grew up in Chester, and read Classics at Cambridge. She lives on the Isle of Man with her husband and children.

Elizabeth describes herself as a “Brontë nerd”.  Call of the Curlew is her homage to the immersive and evocative writing of Charlotte Brontë.

Connect with Elizabeth

Website  ǀ Twitter  ǀ Goodreads

Call of the Curlew Blog Tour Poster

Buchan of the Month: The Half-Hearted by John Buchan

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Buchan of the Month

The HalfheartedAbout the Book

The Half-Hearted is a novel in two parts. Part I is a story of manners and romance in upper-class Scotland, while part II is an action tale of adventure and duty in northern India.

The novel is set in the closing years of the 19th century and explores the way in which the social expectations of the main characters shape the paths they must tread. It follows the life of Lewis Haystoun, a young Scottish laird, who finds himself unable to commit wholeheartedly to any course of action.

Format: Paperback (206 pp.)                   Publisher: Tark Classic Fiction
Published: 26th October 2009 [1900]      Genre: Fiction, Adventure

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Half-Hearted on Goodreads

 

My Review

The Half-Hearted is the sixth book in my Buchan of the Month reading project. You can find out more about the project plus my reading list for 2018 here. You can read a spoiler-free introduction to the book here. The Half-Hearted is also one of my 20 Books of Summer and on my Classics Club list.

As I mention in my introduction, David Daniell, author of The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan, describes The Half-Hearted as ‘an interestingly uneven novel’ but admits that there are some ‘marvellous things’ in the book.  I think this is a fair assessment. One of John Buchan’s early novels, The Half-Hearted provides an indicator of Buchan’s strengths as a writer and the things he would arguably struggle with.

Let’s look at the good things first. In the first part of the book set in the Scottish Highlands, Buchan demonstrates his ability at describing landscape, especially his beloved Scottish countryside. ‘Mists were crowding in the valleys, each bald mountain top shone like a jewel, and far aloft in the heavens were the white streamers of morn. Moorhens were plashing at the loch’s edge, and one tall heron rose from his early meal. The world was astir with life: sounds of the plonk-plonk of rising trout and the endless twitter of woodland birds mingled with the far-away barking of dogs and the lowing of full-uddered cows in the distant meadows.’

The second part of the book, set in Northern India and what is now Afghanistan, is full of ‘derring do’ and the sort of breathless adventure that readers have come to expect from Buchan. Set against the backdrop of the so-called ‘Great Game’ as Britain and Russia vie for territorial advantage in Central Asia and the North-West Frontier of India, Lewis and his friend, George, are sent to the area on an unofficial fact-finding mission and find themselves pitted against the mysterious Marker, thought to be working on behalf of the Russians. Lewis is suspicious of Marker and his motives from the off and suspects his ‘friendly advice’ is deliberate evasion. It’s exciting stuff, very well-described and the story builds to a dramatic conclusion. In the end, Lewis becomes not the ‘half-hearted’ but the ‘stout-hearted’.

Now turning to the less good things… The first part of the book to my mind displays Buchan’s difficulty with depicting romantic relationships that is evident in all his books. The dynamics of the relationship between Lewis and Alice Wishart, the girl to whom he is attracted, never really convince. It’s a story of missed opportunities, true feelings unspoken and misunderstandings that left me rather confused about why it all ends as it does. Lewis has a rival for Alice’s affections and the choice she makes astounds me every time I read the book.  The book also contains some rather scathing remarks about ‘ordinary people’, some rather un-PC generalisations about women and references to Jews that might have been commonplace at the time the book was written but which today we would find distinctly unsavoury, if not bordering on the anti-Semitic.

In The Half-Hearted, Buchan explores themes that he would revisit in other books such as Mr. Standfast and Sick Heart River – honour, self-sacrifice, being prepared to fight for your beliefs, the importance of facing life’s challenges and the value of things hard-won. It’s easy to detect the influence of Buchan’s childhood companion and lifelong vade mecum, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Not for the last time, Buchan attributes virtue to physical fitness and the ‘clean, outdoor life’. Lewis is told, ‘Life has been too easy for you, a great deal too easy. You want a little of the salt and iron of the world.’

Having said all this, The Half-Hearted is a book I’ve read a number of times and for me its shortcomings are outweighed by its good points. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as a book for readers new to Buchan (he wrote better books) but for aficionados it provides fascinating glimpses of the writer Buchan would become.

Next month’s Buchan of the Month is The Watcher by the Threshold, a collection of short stories.

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In three words: Uneven, interesting, adventure

Try something similar…Kim by Rudyard Kipling

John BuchanAbout the Author

John Buchan (1875 – 1940) was an author, poet, lawyer, publisher, journalist, war correspondent, Member of Parliament, University Chancellor, keen angler and family man. He was ennobled and, as Lord Tweedsmuir, became Governor-General of Canada. In this role, he signed Canada’s entry into the Second World War.   Nowadays he is probably best known – maybe only known – as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. However, in his lifetime he published over 100 books: fiction, poetry, short stories, biographies, memoirs and history.

You can find out more about John Buchan, his life and literary output by visiting The John Buchan Society website.