Reviewed by Harriet
October 3rd 1939
Inaction is difficult to bear. Since I am forced into inaction, here, I shall write. Not, as I have written in peace-time, brief things for magazines of intellectual elegance. But retrospects, more or less as a journal.
So begins Sylvia Thompson’s novel. Seeing the publication date of 1941 and the date on this introductory paragraph, you would probably conclude that this is a war novel. But as the third sentence makes clear, Blanche Lancret, the narrator, is going to use her time of waiting to write her memories of the past. What she’s waiting for only becomes clear towards the end of the novel, but there’s a clue on the first page where she talks about Vernon:
I should like all the subtleties and contractions of his nature to be explained with the greatest simplicity, so that the simplest reader would say: “Yes, I understand why she loved him”.
As in all the best novels, the clues that are laid at the beginning are slowly unravelled over the subsequent pages. All we learn about her current situation in the first chapter is that she is living alone in a ‘big mediocre village’ on the edge of a cliff somewhere in England, looking after her friend’s baby. But then she goes on to tell us about herself – her French artist father, now living in Italy, and her Tante Julie, the sister of her dead mother, and her upbringing partly in Italy, partly in Paris. At seventeen she was sent to an English boarding school, where she was befriended by wealthy Bostonian Annabelle Strudwick, and was introduced to Annabelle’s brother Vernon: ‘He was lean for his height, and his eyes were dark and soft-lidded’. The two are drawn together, she visits the family in America, but Vernon has a commitment to Leonora Peck. And later, mainly owing to a series of misunderstandings and some double dealing on the part of Tante Julie’s servant Balthazar, Vernon and Leonora marry. Blanche suffers doubts and sorrow, but all that is assuaged by what must be one of the most understated but wonderfully romantic moments in any novel. This is when, many years later, Blanche is onboard a liner about to leave America for England and Vernon suddenly appears in her cabin, saying simply ‘Please come, darling’.
As Faye Hamill writes in her informative introduction, it is ‘astonishing’ that, unlike her Oxford contemporaries Margaret Kennedy, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain and Naomi Mitchison, Thompson has never before been republished and has had only the barest of mentions in any scholarly books. For this is a truly superb novel, for which Thompson was highly praised by contemporary critics for her ‘delicacy of perception’ and the subtlety and charm of her writing. The book takes the reader through two decades of Blanche’s life, as she travels Europe, stays in England, visits America. Sometimes a long time passes when she does not see Vernon, but her feeling for him never wavers and finally the two are able to spend some idyllic time together before war intervenes and splits them apart. It’s full of fascinating characters, including Blanche’s dreamy, thoughtful father and of course Tante Julie, one-time peasant girl transformed into a glamorous woman about Paris, and her devoted lover Otto Behrens who, probably providentially, dies just as the Germans are invading Paris – given his name and Austrian nationality he would almost certainly have been sent to a concentration camp.
I said at the beginning that this was not a war novel, but of course the war intervenes – the dates of Blanche’s journal entries are sometimes very relevant, as in the one dated 18 June 1940, four days after the German invasion of Paris. And of course the war first forces her to flee to England and then wait in agony to hear from Vernon, in France working as an ambulance driver.
This is the last novel to be published by Handheld Press, who will be sadly missed. But they will be still trading till June of next year, so you can buy this, and any of their other wonderful reprints, many of which have been reviewed on Shiny. And I strongly advise you to do that. This one is simply unmissable.
READ ALSO: Harriet has interviewed Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press HERE.
Harriet is one of the co-founders and an editor of Shiny New Books
Sylvia Thompson, The Gull Fly Inland (Handheld, 2024). 978-1912766-86-4, 194pp., paperback original.
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