Delve into a glorious coming-of-age read for summer sands

If you savour coming-of-age stories set between the wars in the crumbling stately homes of bohemian landowning families that explore the affairs, passions and ambitions of large casts of characters with magnificent period detail and poignant observation, then Joanna Quinn’s debut novel, The Whalebone Theatre, may well be your book of the summer.

Set in Dorset in England’s West Country, where Quinn grew up, the novel opens on the last day of 1919. Our heroine is Cristabel Seagrave, aged three, lonely and unloved, but fierce of spirit and sharp of mind. She is stamping through a quagmire of mud and snow, swishing around a stick like a sword, while the rest of the household is brimming with expectation.

Cristabel’s father, Jasper Seagrave, and his new bride are, at that moment, seated side by side in a horse-drawn carriage, being driven up the driveway to Jasper’s family home, Chilcombe, “a many-gabled, many-chimneyed, ivy-covered manor house with an elephantine air of weary grandeur. In outline, it is a series of sagging triangles and tall chimney stacks, and it has huddled on a wooded cliff overhanging the ocean for 400 years, its leaded windows narrowed against sea winds and historical progress, its general appearance one of gradual subsidence”.

Cristabel’s mother died in childbirth, and grumpy Jasper is the embodiment of the fusty, repressed, middle-aged upperclass Englishman who, having no interest in his young daughter, has married a new mummy for her.

BACKSTORY

Rosalind is far too young and attractive for him, but all the bright young men who once wooed her have died in the war and she considers herself lucky to have at last nabbed a husband, even one as dull as Jasper. Far from being a caricature, however, there is a devastating backstory that explains why Jasper is as he is.

While the initially naive Rosalind imagines at first glittering parties with servants bearing trays of cocktails and canapés, she is instead left alone to wander through dusty rooms while the stern Seagrave ancestors gaze down upon her.

In the tradition of a long line of orphaned children, starting with Charles Dickens, who find themselves without any parental guidance and can therefore carve their own paths, Cristabel is plucky, fiercely imaginative and stunningly precocious. Ignored by her father and Rosalind, a stepmother in the fairy-tale sense, only kitchen maid Maudie Kitkat cares for her.

WAR HERO

For Cristabel, the only redeeming thing about Rosalind is the prospect that she might produce a brother. Instead, there’s a sister, Flossie, promptly dubbed The Veg for her unpromising appearance. But when Jasper falls off a horse and dies, leaving Rosalind with a diminished fortune, a decaying mansion and his charming brother Willoughby, a dashing war hero, to console her, there’s a much prettier boy cousin as well, Digby, the new heir to Chilcombe manor.

Surrounded by distant adults, alone in the middle of nowhere, possessed of spirit and imagination, the siblings love each other passionately, and Cristabel becomes their leader, undertaking their entertainment and education.

And then one stormy night in 1928, a huge whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the king, but 12-year-old Cristabel has other plans.

“A mighty leviathan!” she shouts to some fishermen. “I

have claimed it.” She and Flossie, Digby, Maudie and Taras, a visiting artist, build a theatre from the beast’s rib cage.

In the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life. She stages plays with cast and crew recruited from family, staff and houseguests, her fame and ambition growing as the novel leads us to World War 2.

Cristabel and Digby become spies in Nazi-occupied France

a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.

Quinn’s writing is emotionally intelligent and extremely funny with an abundance of insight into human folly. There is much joy and misery in this manylayered sweeping historical saga. It’s a tale as grand and compelling as any fading country pile and as full of hidden delights.

MUCH JOY AND MISERY IN THIS HISTORICAL SAGA … AS GRAND AND COMPELLING AS ANY FADING COUNTRY PILE AND AS FULL OF HIDDEN DELIGHTS