Review: The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For a book described as one of the 100 best thriller novels and "brimming with heartstopping action" (blurb on the version I read), this has a very slow burn for a very long time, about two-thirds of its total word count.

Not that it isn't good. In place of that long-delayed heartstopping action we get a good deal of character development, rare in the thriller/suspense genre, of our two central characters: the narrator, Carruthers, a junior Foreign Office clerk, and his old university acquaintance Davies. Davies invites Carruthers via letter to join him on his (very small and uncomfortable, as it turns out) yacht in the Baltic just when Carruthers is fed up with having to work - at something quite unimportant - while everyone else he knows is off at country-house parties. He finishes his work and, on a whim, joins Davies, who eventually confides in him that he thinks a man he's met is English, not German as he presents himself, and tried to kill Davies by leading him into a dangerous area in a storm. Davies also believes that there's something going on in terms of preparations for war (this is in 1903) in the shallow harbours and channels between the East Frisian islands and the German coast, and that as patriotic Englishmen they should try to find out more. He wanted Carruthers with him in part because Carruthers speaks good German.

It's interesting to me that, before World War I, a good many English people seem to have liked and admired the Germans and even the German empire. Read, for example, Three Men on the Bummel or Diary of a Pilgrimage , both by Jerome K. Jerome. Of course, thinking that Germany was good didn't stop them thinking that Britain was better, and that's the case for Davies, who admires the Kaiser but is also keen to spy on Germany if that protects his own country.

For a long time, there's no real sense of danger. Yes, they're in a small boat in October in a region where running aground and bad weather are basically daily occurrences, but the boat is very sound (it's a converted lifeboat), Davies is an extremely competent sailor, and he keeps downplaying any danger as part of his characterization. What there mainly is is a sense of discomfort. The boat is small, cramped, damp, impossible to keep clean, and full of fumes from its petroleum-fueled stove, on which the pair cook bad rations. The whole trip is based on one the author had made about five years before the book came out with his brother and another man, which gives a deeply authentic feel to the incidental details of both the experience of sailing and also of the location.

The relationship between the two men also feels real. They weren't close friends before the trip, though they liked each other well enough, but as the story progresses they get to understand each other better and appreciate each other's strengths, with occasional brief arguments. Carruthers lets go of his annoyance at the discomforts of the trip a lot more easily than I would have, even at his age, but it's believable as a dawning of self-insight and not taking himself so seriously. The two become comrades by working towards a common goal, facing challenges together. It's a classic early-20th-century-Englishmen's friendship, though in many ways it's just a classic men's friendship, where you respect each other and get on with a common task with a minimum of drama (especially since they are very English, and drama, or even direct acknowledgement of emotions, would be not quite the thing).

At length, we do get some genuinely suspenseful narrative. First, taking advantage of Davies' uncanny ability to navigate the shoals using soundings, they sneak through a heavy fog in a rowing boat for a distance of about 12 miles so that Carruthers can spy on a meeting between their suspects in the hope of discovering what's going on. They get some more information, but a lot of it is overheard words without clear context, and they have to put in more work - and Carruthers has to do a daring solo mission, in disguise - to figure out what the Germans' plan actually is.

At this point, the book winds up in a hurry. It could, I felt, have lingered a little more over the fate of the characters, rather than just concluding with a summary by the "editor" (Childers, claiming to be working from Carruthers' and Davies' accounts) of the political and military upshot. After all, the first two-thirds of the book is us coming to care about the characters.

Still, it's a strong piece of work, with lots of layers of character and setting carefully built up to give a richer picture than the usual superficial suspense novel, and I recommend it.

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