Feb. 27th, 2025

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The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers. I had assumed from the title that this book would take place in, say, the Sahara, but not at all! Here's the premise. It's the autumn of maybe 1900 or 1901, and Davies, an upper-class British guy whose great passion is sailing, is exploring the Frisian Islands, directly off the northwestern German coast, and decides something dodgy is going on. In his wild imagination, it involves the security of his beloved homeland, because after all, Germany is rather aggressive (but note that this was written more than 10 years before the start of World War I). He writes to our narrator, Carruthers, and invites him to join him for some yachting fun. Carruthers and Davies had gone to school together and are not close friends, but Davies knows that Carruthers speaks fluent German and has better people skills than he does, which could come in handy. Carruthers is bored and restless at his civil service job in London and needs a vacation, so he heads off to see what Davies is up to. He's surprised that the scruffy boat is not much of a "yacht" and that there are no servants, etc., but eventually Davies opens up and explains what had happened to him in the Frisian Islands, and they head back to explore. The author does an excellent job helping the reader pass the time while the two of them work on mapping out all of the channels in the sand, which depend greatly on the tides, and even though they're in what must surely be one of the most boring places on the Earth, the pace is pretty good, and things start happening. There was one small point near the end where I didn't really understand what had happened, and the author ends up using quite a few nautical terms that aren't in the glossary at the back of the book, so the reader has to look them up elsewhere or just accept that they aren't going to get to picture everything. The descriptions of the places and people and the psychology of the two main charactes are great, and the story is plenty interesting.

This book, which was published in 1903, is considered the first of the modern British spy novels. (I asked the Google AI what about Kipling's Kim, which was published just a couple of years previously, and was told that Kim is more of an adventure story with espionage elements, whereas The Riddle of the Sands establishes patterns for the entire genre that followed.) I wish Childers had written more novels, as he was obviously a fine writer, but apparently the point of writing this one was try to get through to the British public about the need for a North Sea fleet and coastal defense, which his non-fiction books had failed at, and indeed, the novel was a huge best-seller, and he succeeded in his policy goals. Maybe if he had lived longer, he would eventually have decided to write some more. In the 1920s, however, being in possession of a firearm while known to favor Irish independence was a capital offense, and Childers was executed by the British at age 52.

There's a paragraph on p.111, though, where Davies is holding forth on the merits of ordinary British coastal residents with their ordinary boats, and the difference they could make in the defense of Britain: "...anything that floats will be pressed into the service, and anyone who can steer a boat, knows his waters, and doesn't care the toss of a coin for his life, will have magnificent opportunities"... "what you want is boats — mosquitos with stings — swarms of them — patrol-boats, scout-boats, torpedo-boats; intelligent irregulars manned by local men, with a pretty free hand to play their own game." I have to wonder. If this book hadn't been so immensely popular and familiar to the British public, would they have been able to muster just such a force so effectively, for the evacuation of Dunkirk?
eve_prime: (cone)
Today J felt a bit better than yesterday - no more hiccups! - and I felt a bit more ill. I spent an hour in an uncomfortable chair while attending an online meeting with the Oxford author of the Beethoven book we'd just read in a local online book club, and when the meeting ended my back was unhappy and it was rather hard to walk. Soon after that, I spent an hour on the phone with my stressed-out neighbor, talking her down from a public confrontation with another neighbor, so that was my good deed for the day. After lunch I tried reading a couple of papers for work, but in the middle of the second I abruptly needed a nap. But I did finish a book, and when I was outside in the afternoon to check the mail, the sunshine actually felt pleasantly warm!

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