Review: The Good Comrade

The Good Comrade by Una Lucy Silberrad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Not, as you might assume from the title, a socialist novel.

The "Good Comrade" is the name given to the McGuffin, a rare blue daffodil, but it's named by the heroine in honour of the three men who love her, and one of them also independently thought of her by the same title. The book is a reflection on the nature of relationships, mostly between men and women, but also in families, and between unrelated people with no romantic connection. Being English, it also has a strong theme related to social class, that most English way of people relating to other people.

I picked it up from Project Gutenberg a while ago on the recommendation of a fellow member of the Codex writers' forum. That forum is for speculative fiction writers, but it isn't spec-fic, or my other main reading genre, mystery/thriller; if anything, it's a romance, but a very unusual one. The big strength of the book, as of its heroine, is that it's unexpected and not like others. (Authentically not like, rather than "not like other girls".)

The heroine, Julia, comes from a family that has fallen into relative poverty from its already very minor social status because of the father's gambling problem. He was encouraged to leave the army with the rank of captain, which he still uses. In English literature, a retired army officer only having made captain often indicates that he was either unpromotable or terminated his career early for probably dodgy reasons, and in this case it's both. (Christie's Captain Hastings is an exception.)

The family, however, do everything they can to put up a good front and conceal their fall. Their drawing room, for example, is better furnished than the rest of the house, since that's the part visitors see. Julia, the middle daughter, sees this for the trumpery it is, and is the only one who has much gumption or tries to do anything other than marry for (relatively minor) advantage. She's not as good-looking as her two sisters, but I found it fully plausible that several men fell in love with her anyway, because she's such an interesting person - intelligent and not overly bound by convention (including, it's remarked by one of her admirers, the conventions of the usual unconventional person, the bohemian - she doesn't have that pose either).

This is probably why she goes on a day's walk in his company. They've become friends, non-romantic, and enjoy each other's company - they are "good comrades," in fact. This occurs in the Dutch village where Julia is working as a paid companion in the house of a bulb grower, a prosperous merchant who loves his trade for its own sake, as does his son, rather than purely for the money they can make from it. The pair, Julia and her male friend, get lost on their walk when a fog comes down, and spend the night outside together, perfectly innocently - but her Calvinistic Dutch employers are obliged to treat her as having compromised herself utterly and dismiss her without a reference. (This is 1907.)

The plot doesn't follow convention much more than Julia does, though it's not experimental; it just doesn't go in the expected directions, and is mostly unpredictable, though I did spot what Julia's next move was likely to be after her dismissal. (view spoiler)[She competently and daringly steals a chemical formula that she has inferred her male friend was trying, and has failed, to steal for the British government from a local Dutch chemist, and sends it to him anonymously, but he, of course, knows instantly that nobody else could have known about his mission or done this. (hide spoiler)]

There are some great character observations, of Julia's father, of his friend, of Julia's several suitors, and of course of Julia herself. Her character develops and is revealed through the choices she makes, and she's an admirable person without being perfect at all. Also, various characters take action and are inspired by each other, or their ideas about each other. The characters and their relationships are the great strength of the book.

Its weakness is that the author's style is patchy. She can convey a sense of place wonderfully, but she doesn't write beautiful prose for the most part, and is difficult to quote because her well-observed points tend to be a paragraph or two long rather than a sentence. She's also rather given to comma-splicing. That kept the book off the Platinum tier of my annual list, but it's certainly worthy of five stars as far as I'm concerned.

According to Wikipedia, Silberrad was thought of as a "middlebrow" writer, who steered a course firmly between the conservatism that stood for the way things currently were and the radicalism that wanted to burn it all down, aiming along what would actually be the trajectory of the 20th century: gradual improvement in various social measures, particularly the equality and freedom of women. That's probably why I like her book. I myself concluded long ago that, as well as being middle-aged and middle-class, I'm also middlebrow; no point in denying it, might as well embrace it. And my own politics are neither radical nor reactionary. Julia is just the kind of intelligent (though not necessarily highly educated), capable and determined character I enjoy reading about, and I recommend the book unreservedly.

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