Whale of a Tale

Author Joanna Quinn’s The Whalebone Theatre goes back in time to deliver exquisite presence.

Had Shakespeare written Downton Abbey, it might look a lot like The Whalebone Theatre.

That is to say, readers of The Bard and fans of Lady Mary will likely find themselves right at home amid its pages.

But while it contains recognizable elements, thanks to the skill of author Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre (2022) distinguishes itself, both structurally and stylistically.

Structurally, Quinn’s novel is split into five acts, each covering a specific snippet of time.

Act one centers on the rivalry between two aristocratic English brothers – Jasper and Willoughby Seagrave – in the early 1900s. Their strained relationship plays out in and around the walls of ivy-covered Chilcombe manor house in Dorset.

As the book opens, Jasper – already a widower with a daughter named Cristabel – has procured a younger second wife, Rosalind, in hopes of generating a male Seagrave heir. Alas, she and Jasper produce another daughter, Florence, whom her mother refers to witheringly as “The Vegetable.”

Only when Jasper dies in a riding accident and Willoughby claims Rosalind as his own does the long-sought-after heir finally appear: a son named Digby.

The second act jumps ahead nearly a decade, at which point it becomes clear the three Seagrave children – creative Cristabel, long-suffering Florence (now called Flossie), and dutiful Digby – are the true protagonists of the book.

Cristabel lays claims to the carcass of a fin whale washed ashore near their estate. When a mad Russian artist – a veritable Rasputin with brushes – likewise materializes, the Seagrave three convert the skeleton of the dead leviathan into the framework for a theatre within which to present Shakespearian productions on the Chilcombe grounds.

This motif of creating value from the undervalued – and making the best of what one is given – is fertile soil for the author. Watch, for example, as Cristabel admires the completed structure:

“When she looks up, she sees the bones arching over her head against the vast starry sky like roof beams, like the skeletal beginnings of a strange new home. Something she has made from what was washed up, unwanted; something created from what was left to her.”

Act three brings the harsh realities of World War II to Chilcombe, and the Seagrave three do their part: Digby fights in France and Cristabel joins the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force while Flossie manages the home front. With the help of a German prisoner of war assigned to the estate, she converts the Whalebone Theatre into a vegetable garden.

The fourth act finds the Seagrave three reunited for a brief time at Chilcombe, but it’s clear the war is taking a physical and psychological toll as they disperse to fulfill different (and sometimes clandestine) military functions.

The fifth and final act takes place as the Allies liberate France, but as with any story set in the mid-1940s, it’s not without a fair share of tragedy amid the triumph as the Seagrave three face their ultimate fates.

Stylistically, The Whalebone Theatre contains a number of nice touches and outright flourishes.

Foremost among these is Quinn’s decision to unfold the story in present tense (“Cristabel wakes in the night,” for example, and “the car jolts down the driveway”) rather than the more traditional past tense, giving the story an immersive immediacy that plays in counterpoint to its historical setting.

Quinn writes the prose equivalent of poetry, treating the reader to passages that contain as much evocation as they do information.

Of Jasper’s first wife, Annabel, we learn that, from his perspective, “She was bracing: she was the wind that smacked you in the face when you set your horse at a gallop, and she was the warming brandy waiting for you by the fire at home.”

Quinn’s book is also notable for its typographic treatment of the text during key passages. When a German aerial bomb plummets through an exposed ventilator shaft and decimates an underground nightclub, the words are arranged on the page in a downward funnel that opens back up at the bottom – with words blown apart – to mimic the bomb’s destructive force.

At one point, the Seagrave children hide in a cloakroom so as to listen in on an adult dinner party. The reader is treated to a list of things the children learn (“The sound of breaking glass can, after a while, cease to be startling”) as well as what they would have learned had they not fallen asleep (“At the end of dinner parties, people start having the same conversations they had at the beginning, only louder and over the top of each other”).

The novel also contains a number of passages penned by the characters – letters to one another, or diary entries, for example – that gain further poignancy in the fact that, for various reasons, some go unread by others.

If you can help it, don’t let the same fate befall this gem of a novel.

To purchase your copy of The Whalebone Theatre, visit bookshop.org, the indie bookstore alternative to Amazon.

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