Review: The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith

The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A terrific thriller from a century ago.

Jane Smith is exactly the kind of determined, brave, sensible, intelligent young woman I particularly like to see as a protagonist. Several of her more foolish fellow characters dislike her, because she isn't attempting to conceal that she's not suffering them gladly, but I thought she was wonderful.

She's not a stoic, though, and in fact she's a very believable young woman not long out of school. She gets frightened, a lot, and cries on multiple occasions. But she has good reason for both reactions, and, crucially, she doesn't let how she feels stop her from doing what she thinks is right.

The biggest flaw of the book is that Jane keeps being coincidentally in the exact right place at the exact right time for the plot to progress. She overhears conversations, sees people enter secret passages, finds a letter that, if she hadn't found it, would have caused a lot of trouble, not least for her, and of course stumbles and accidentally finds the hidden switch that opens one of those secret passages, with which this novel's setting abounds.

But she is at least looking for the switch when that happens, and, despite all of this helpful-to-the-plot coincidence, she does protagonize, and nothing falls into her lap; she has to be very brave and clever to thwart the evil conspiracy.

That conspiracy is a vaguely defined anarchist/socialist/communist/bolshevist thing, something to do with organized labour, but super radical, in that everyone who's not part of it is to be eliminated all around the world, using some mysterious (presumably chemical-warfare-related) formula which has been stolen from a government lab. My grandfather and great-grandfather were Red Federationalists at around this same time, but I'm reasonably confident that they didn't plot the overthrow of civilization and the deaths of millions. This seems to have been a middle-class bogeyman at the time, along with the "Yellow Peril," and about as real.

Still, I can set that aside for the sake of the story, which is gripping, and delivered in excellent but prose that, however, doesn't draw attention to itself. Unusually, the point of view is omniscient - sometimes switching between different characters' perceptions in the same scene - and the narrator even says "I suppose that..." at one point. It isn't obtrusive, as omniscient narration can easily be, and is mostly indistinguishable from the more usual third-person limited.

There are scenes in which the characters struggle, and look as if they'll succeed, but are thwarted, and then have to try something else, and this goes back and forth a few times, which is great for sustained tension. Jane rescues the Scotland Yard man who's in love with her at one point. We get a long thread in which someone seems one way and we eventually discover otherwise. The main villain is creepy and obsessive and believable. All the main characters have depth and dimension; they're not just their archetype and their plot role and one or two minor tags to distinguish them, they have a complex inner life, things they're striving for and that they fear, a push and pull of wanting something and also not wanting it, abilities that aren't just there for the plot.

It's a fine piece of work, apart from the coincidences and the bogeyman, and sits comfortably in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. I'll be looking for more from this author.

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