Thrills and spills in the North Sea (The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers)

Member Name: Jumbo Scotch Egg

Product:	The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers
Date:	14/07/01 (158 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A very fine read

Disadvantages: Not really worth mentioning

The golden age of the British thriller lasted from the turn of the century (the 19th) to the outbreak of the WWII. It centred around three writers, all with similar outlooks and styles - John Buchan, Sapper and Dornford Yates. First and foremost they were colonialist writers, and their books reflected imperial Britain in virtually every sentence. Only John Buchan, whose work has dated the least, is still widely read. However, the other survivor from the period is the Anglo-Irish writer Erskine Childers, a man with a very different background, who only wrote one novel - The Riddle of the Sands. Childers produce an instant classic at his first attempt, then went away to live the life that others only wrote about.

The Riddle of the Sands is narrated by Carruthers, a bored Foreign Office official. At a loose end during the summer of 1903 he accepts an invitation from an acquaintance called Davies to go yachting in the Baltic. He is dismayed to find that Davies’s promises of yachting and duck shooting are not at all what he’d been lead to expect. Davies’s boat, the Dulcibella, is small, cramped and shabby, and it gradually becomes apparent that he has something else in mind that doesn’t involve ducks. Davies knows the waters off the German and Dutch coasts like the back of his hand, and he suspects the Germans are up to something. The pair explore the are in the Dulcibella hoping to find out what’s really going on.

The greatest aspect of the novel is its fantastic setting. The coasts of Holland and Germany are hemmed in by rows of islands, and the mainland has been eroded back behind them. Between the islands is a maze of sandbanks which disappear at high water. Only a boat as small as the Dulcibella can navigate through these treacherous waters. Davies is an expert sailor, and much of the book is spent tacking between islands and down tortuous channels. This may not sound too exciting, but Childers’s
descriptions are very effective. He creates a sinister atmosphere full of hidden dangers - fog, high tides, shifting sands and unreliable charts, sudden storms in the night. The two main characters are stumbling in the dark both physically and mentally, trying to second guess the currents as well as the Germans. Childers also lays on plenty of yachting technicalities and sailing speak, which seems off-putting at first. However, it doesn’t take long to realise that it there is no need at all to understand what he actually means. All the talk of shoal waters, ebb tides, binnacles and galliotts adds enormously to the atmosphere.

The relationship between Carruthers and Davies is fascinating. When they first meet up Carruthers is suffering from ennui (a pre-requisite in this kind of book - just like Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps). He is even sulkier when he finds Davies has conned him into slumming it on a second rate boat. They are "constrained with each other" until Carruthers realises he is being a cad and starts to appreciate Davies’s unsophisticated charm. However, something remains between them, an unspoken tension. It becomes gradually clear- Davies has met a woman! At some point before the book starts he encountered Fraulein Dollman, who eventually takes on an important role in the plot, and he likes her. This leads to shame and confusion, and provides a fascinating insight into how messed up these characters really are. Just read this: "’I hate sentiment and so do you’. ‘I find it very difficult to tell people things’, said Davies, ‘things like this’. I waited. ‘I did like her - very much.’ Our eyes met for a second, during which all that needed to be said was said, as between two of our phlegmatic race." They really do engage in some serious displacement activity, trying to ignore the opposite sex by sailing together at physically very close quarters
into the middle of nowhere. A lot of questions remain unasked, but then half the charm of this kind of book comes from the unintentional innuendo.

However, bizarre period pieces aside, the most interesting aspect of the Riddle of the Sands is the fact that it is so autobiographical. Childers was a combination of both Davies and Carruthers. He knew the German coast and its sandbanks well and sailed there for years. He worked in Whitehall and volunteered to fight in the Boer War. He was very patriotic, but critical of the ability and tactics of those in charge. Davies has strong opinions on the incompetence of the Navy, which refused to let him enlist. This is Childers talking. He seems to have appreciated the threat from Germany’s naval expansion at an early stage. He was concerned that Britain’s world position was under threat and that war was approaching. The Riddle of the Sands is a political manifesto as much as a thriller, and the author’s strongly held convictions shine though. It is therefore particularly interesting that Childers, after winning the DSO in WWI, became a captain in the Irish Republican Army during the 1922 rebellion and was shot by a British firing squad.

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