The Whalebone Theatre: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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Joanna Quinn was born in London and grew up in Dorset, in the southwest of England, where her bestselling debut novel, The Whalebone Theatre, is set. Joanna Quinn, a creative writing teacher, has gone big with her first novel, following the fortunes of the Seagraves from 1919 to 1945. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas .

For instance, later in the novel, Flossie and her German POW beau walk through a landscape full of disintegration that reflects the dissolution of their brief, and doomed, relationship; marrying the characters to the scene in which we view them: ‘When the sun finally starts to set, they walk back through the woods […].

The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, “sick of pushing tiddlywinks about” as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in “Mr. On atmospherics, “The Whalebone Theatre” is absolute aces, to borrow the patois of the Americans who drop in for cultural contrast, new-moneyed and loud. It is mid-morning, a Tuesday in the first week of May, and since entering the woods, their conversation has fallen away. Overseen by a vague French governess, they educate themselves with books stolen from the study, by eavesdropping from cloakrooms on drunken dinner parties and by running around with young “savages” they encounter scuttling naked around the shore, the progeny of Taras, a daring Russian artist.

Every single word was exactly right and the visual imagery she is able to draw with words is astounding. But far away from the big house, as the children grow to adulthood, another story has been unfolding in the wings. The older observer finds it all ravishing — so pared down, so elegant — but notes that there’s nowhere comfortable to sit and after a while their bottom starts to hurt.An unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, fiercely determined to do things differently.

However, the complete lack of parenting meant that these three children grew up in a world of their own making. The Whalebone Theatre’ gives us a cast of memorable eccentric characters; however, there are moments when Quinn relies heavily on stereotypes to the detriment of the story. I find myself unable to critique the last few acts of the novel, because they are so absorbing that I abandoned my critical reader and surrendered to wholehearted emotional entanglement with the novel and the characters.Her stolid father, Jasper — still mourning his late wife, who haunts the ancestral pile like a more benign Rebecca de Winter — will soon be dead as well, tumbled from a horse (of course), his dashing younger brother, Willoughby, stepping easily into his shoes. It is the sort of book that makes real life dim as you become absorbed in its heartbreaks, love affairs and revelations. There was so much promise but the telling of the story was simple, predictable and there were many occasions where I was left wondering what was I reading and who was this aimed at - it almost felt like a children's story. Or perhaps he is simply too close to her for her to see him properly, like a mirror held right in front of her face. She and her younger half sibling, Flossie (nicknamed “the Veg” for an indelicate countenance), and cousin Digby, whom she treasures as a brother, circumvent the laws about “fishes royal” belonging to the king, and will make of the whale skeleton a giant play space: to stage actual plays, the greatest hits of Shakespeare’s catalog, with help from the bohemian adults visiting Chilcombe, the estate where they live.

The brother she wanted and the brother she has, two different notions entirely, and cousin Digby, who is not really her brother, and actual Digby, her most faithful and cheering companion. Telling the story of a landowning family with the habit of collecting bohemian hangers-on over the first half of the twentieth century, at the centre of the narrative is Christabel Seagrave, an ‘odd’ little girl who becomes a teenage amateur theatre director and then a ‘Clerk Special Duties’ during WW2. Charismatic, orphaned Cristabel, is their leader and the centre of their world of play and make-believe; she is strong, self-sufficient, imaginative. April is blown away by another round of storms, thunder rolling about the bay like a wooden skittle ball, then May steps in with a curtsey, and Dorset blooms with a giddy enthusiasm, like a young girl at her first county ball spun about the dance floor by a strong-handed farmer.The sunlight has stretched across the woodland floor throughout the day, across the celandines, anemones and dog violets.