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feather_ghyll) wrote2023-02-12 03:25 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2023-02-12 03:25 pm
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REVIEW: The Pearl Thief
The Pearl Thief: Elizabeth Wein, Bloomsbury, May 2017
This prequel to ‘Code Name Verity’ and ‘Rose Under Fire’ is both mystery and coming-of-age tale, in which Julie Beaufort-Stuart (or Lady Julia if you must) is spending a last summer at Strathfearn, where she and her big brothers would come for holidays. Julie is on the verge of turning sixteen, twixt childhood and adulthood, but considered old enough to help pack up at Strathfearn, for Julie’s grandfather has died, leaving debts that mean that the estate is already sold and will become a boarding school.
Julie is a complex, vibrant figure, forming fast – she arrives at Strathfearn having pretended to be 20 on her train journey from her Swiss school. She has cause to take on the persona of Davie Balfour, Stevenson’s hero in ‘Kidnapped’ for a while. But there are consequences to her pretendings. On one level, she finds out more about who she is over this summer, and one of the things that’s most engaging about her is her candour about her feelings and failings as the tells her story.
In particular, because of her interactions with the McEwens, Scottish Travellers, she gets to see some of her privilege, not least because Ellen McEwen keeps challenging her about it. But we also see that Julie is hemmed in because of upper class expectations, especially of girls. All her life she’s compared her treatment with that of her older brothers. But certain things are possible to Julie that are denied to Ellen, or a pair of maids about their own age they encounter – things that would not occur to people not born to her position (or who have not got five older brothers and a mother with occasional Bolshevik tendencies).
Class, gender and sexuality are mulled over but this is a book that’s got a mystery at its heart. Although this is set in peacetime, if you’ve read ‘Verity’ and ‘Rose’, the brute violence at certain points of this book will not be unfamiliar. On her first day, Julie is hit on the head so badly that she cannot remember what happened when she comes to in pain. This at a time when she and her family are facing many memories as they prepare to leave ‘the Big House’, the nearby ruined castle and the river Fearn where generation after generation of their family have lived.
But what happened to Julie is not the only mystery, there’s a missing person, and as clue after clue is found, the police have to be called in and it casts a rather grim shadow over an already melancholy family.
Many people are suspicious of the McEwens, who are camping nearby. From them, Julie met with great kindness, so she’s dismayed to see this bigotry even from someone she admires as much as Mary Kinnaird. Mary is the local librarian, who Julie has always thought brave for how she lives with her disability. Julie and Jamie, her nearest and favourite brother, who has come to join the family party, befriend twins Ellen and Ewan, with both Beaufort-Stuarts admiring queenly Ellen. As a result, they learn how closely these Travellers’ lives have been intertwined with their family’s for centuries.
It’s such a rich book, from Julie’s romantic explorations to her realisations that she hadn’t been quite as clever as she thought she was, to the moments where she is the clever one who puts all the pieces of the jigsaw together, to her moments of sheer rage at authority abused. Words are used lovingly, satisfyingly, and though it’s absolutely a twenty-first century take on the period, it’s not anachronistic, and taps into the habits of the people who lived, fished and died near the same river in the Bronze Age, in the Iron Age, in the middle ages, in Mary Queen of Scots’s day, or within living memory. Growing up by learning unpleasant truths about yourself, others and the world, and learning that you can be brave, that you have allies and a shared inheritance is universal.
Having said that, it’s an utterly Scottish book. Julie is as romantic about Mary Queen of Scots as any Scottish lass in the 1930s would be. Robbie Burns is quoted. It’s steeped in Scottish laws, words and traditions – from the kilt to the fishing for freshwater pearls that is a part of the story.
Reading the author’s notes, which point out very clearly that Scottish river mussels are now an endangers species and protected, it appears that it was the elements of Scottish Traveller life, pearl fishing, the location, (a fictionalised version of real places in Perthsire) and archaeology that helped inspire the book. Wein doesn’t really talk about wanting to spend more time with Julie before she became the character we met in ‘Verity’, which is how I’d assumed she set about it.
I think ‘The Pearl Thief’ would work as an excellent standalone novel, but, of course, it isn’t. If you have read ‘Verity’ as I have, you will know that not only does war come in September 1939, just over a year away from the events of this story, you will know what Julie does afterwards (stop reading this review if you haven’t now.)
So, the sensitivity to ghosts that the dog Pinkie shares with Julie takes on an added layer. As Julie wonders what will become of her – she is determined to go to university as some of her brothers had, and not to be married off to organise shooting parties as her mother does, for one thing - we know precisely what is to come. We see all the shades of Julie’s character I’ve mentioned above with this foreknowledge.
I don’t think I’m ready to reread ‘Verity’, which I thought wonderful but harrowing (this book is wonderful too and less harrowing). But I see Wein’s published another book in what she calles the Code Name Verity cycle, so I’ll get that instead.
I’d love to know what happened to the McEwen twins (and Sandy and Mary) during the war.
(Also, I felt vindicated, because I never liked a certain character from the off.)
This prequel to ‘Code Name Verity’ and ‘Rose Under Fire’ is both mystery and coming-of-age tale, in which Julie Beaufort-Stuart (or Lady Julia if you must) is spending a last summer at Strathfearn, where she and her big brothers would come for holidays. Julie is on the verge of turning sixteen, twixt childhood and adulthood, but considered old enough to help pack up at Strathfearn, for Julie’s grandfather has died, leaving debts that mean that the estate is already sold and will become a boarding school.
Julie is a complex, vibrant figure, forming fast – she arrives at Strathfearn having pretended to be 20 on her train journey from her Swiss school. She has cause to take on the persona of Davie Balfour, Stevenson’s hero in ‘Kidnapped’ for a while. But there are consequences to her pretendings. On one level, she finds out more about who she is over this summer, and one of the things that’s most engaging about her is her candour about her feelings and failings as the tells her story.
In particular, because of her interactions with the McEwens, Scottish Travellers, she gets to see some of her privilege, not least because Ellen McEwen keeps challenging her about it. But we also see that Julie is hemmed in because of upper class expectations, especially of girls. All her life she’s compared her treatment with that of her older brothers. But certain things are possible to Julie that are denied to Ellen, or a pair of maids about their own age they encounter – things that would not occur to people not born to her position (or who have not got five older brothers and a mother with occasional Bolshevik tendencies).
Class, gender and sexuality are mulled over but this is a book that’s got a mystery at its heart. Although this is set in peacetime, if you’ve read ‘Verity’ and ‘Rose’, the brute violence at certain points of this book will not be unfamiliar. On her first day, Julie is hit on the head so badly that she cannot remember what happened when she comes to in pain. This at a time when she and her family are facing many memories as they prepare to leave ‘the Big House’, the nearby ruined castle and the river Fearn where generation after generation of their family have lived.
But what happened to Julie is not the only mystery, there’s a missing person, and as clue after clue is found, the police have to be called in and it casts a rather grim shadow over an already melancholy family.
Many people are suspicious of the McEwens, who are camping nearby. From them, Julie met with great kindness, so she’s dismayed to see this bigotry even from someone she admires as much as Mary Kinnaird. Mary is the local librarian, who Julie has always thought brave for how she lives with her disability. Julie and Jamie, her nearest and favourite brother, who has come to join the family party, befriend twins Ellen and Ewan, with both Beaufort-Stuarts admiring queenly Ellen. As a result, they learn how closely these Travellers’ lives have been intertwined with their family’s for centuries.
It’s such a rich book, from Julie’s romantic explorations to her realisations that she hadn’t been quite as clever as she thought she was, to the moments where she is the clever one who puts all the pieces of the jigsaw together, to her moments of sheer rage at authority abused. Words are used lovingly, satisfyingly, and though it’s absolutely a twenty-first century take on the period, it’s not anachronistic, and taps into the habits of the people who lived, fished and died near the same river in the Bronze Age, in the Iron Age, in the middle ages, in Mary Queen of Scots’s day, or within living memory. Growing up by learning unpleasant truths about yourself, others and the world, and learning that you can be brave, that you have allies and a shared inheritance is universal.
Having said that, it’s an utterly Scottish book. Julie is as romantic about Mary Queen of Scots as any Scottish lass in the 1930s would be. Robbie Burns is quoted. It’s steeped in Scottish laws, words and traditions – from the kilt to the fishing for freshwater pearls that is a part of the story.
Reading the author’s notes, which point out very clearly that Scottish river mussels are now an endangers species and protected, it appears that it was the elements of Scottish Traveller life, pearl fishing, the location, (a fictionalised version of real places in Perthsire) and archaeology that helped inspire the book. Wein doesn’t really talk about wanting to spend more time with Julie before she became the character we met in ‘Verity’, which is how I’d assumed she set about it.
I think ‘The Pearl Thief’ would work as an excellent standalone novel, but, of course, it isn’t. If you have read ‘Verity’ as I have, you will know that not only does war come in September 1939, just over a year away from the events of this story, you will know what Julie does afterwards (stop reading this review if you haven’t now.)
So, the sensitivity to ghosts that the dog Pinkie shares with Julie takes on an added layer. As Julie wonders what will become of her – she is determined to go to university as some of her brothers had, and not to be married off to organise shooting parties as her mother does, for one thing - we know precisely what is to come. We see all the shades of Julie’s character I’ve mentioned above with this foreknowledge.
I don’t think I’m ready to reread ‘Verity’, which I thought wonderful but harrowing (this book is wonderful too and less harrowing). But I see Wein’s published another book in what she calles the Code Name Verity cycle, so I’ll get that instead.
I’d love to know what happened to the McEwen twins (and Sandy and Mary) during the war.
(Also, I felt vindicated, because I never liked a certain character from the off.)