There’s plenty to be said about a 500-page book and The Whalebone Theatre has made quite a splash with reviews in pretty much every major publication. I avoid reviews whenever I’m starting a book, but I’m always happy to read them afterwards for other perspectives. What took me by surprise in this case was the constant comparisons to other works about aristocratic English families in the 20^th century. Now on the surface this makes sense: this is a book about an aristocratic English family living through the first half of the 20^th century so of course comparing it to others seems reasonable, but when I was reading The Whalebone Theatre, I didn’t stop and think about an other fictional families or grand estates… all I could think about was this family and this story.

Quinn starts us off right after a wedding that is both an unhappy yet practical match (the definition of a great deal of marriages) and the core of the family we are about to follow. Jasper and his new wife Rosalind return home to Chilcombe, the great house where most of the action is set, and Jasper’s young daughter, Cristabel. Their physical proximity does not lead to an emotional connection. Rosalind is distant and vain, but she’s not the stereotypical torturous stepmother. (As the novel goes on you realize Quinn prefers filling the long, dusty corridors of the great house with more nuance than that.)

Quinn constantly realigns a reader’s opinion of her characters throughout the text and the first great moment is when she turns our attention to Jasper. At first glance, his role in the novel seems to be as the heartless head of the household as he fails to settle his wife into her new remote life, fails to connect with his brother, and ignores his child. However, we soon learn he is in fact heartbroken. He loved his opinionated and straightforward first wife (Cristabel’s mother) and has given up since she died until finally he follows her to the grave early in the novel.

This slow reveal of character details happens again and again and keeps the reader engaged with everyone through all of the years and changing relationships. With Willoughby, Jasper’s younger brother, Quinn builds a charming, whimsical, war hero who marries his brother’s widow, has two children, throws parties, and then when the children are all old enough, abandons his ancestral home. I spent most of the novel wondering why everyone wasn’t more angry with him until Cristabel’s reminder at the very end that his own war experiences and loss mean that he would rather be “held in her imagination” than seen “soaked in grief and alcohol.”

The relationship between the second generation, the children of Chilcombe, was the real magic of the novel for me. Cristabel, Flossie, and Digby are a mix of half-siblings and cousins thanks to the complicated lives of their parents, but they go through life as a team. They are honest but loving and see each other’s strengths and weaknesses clearly. This was the core relationship of the text and it really didn’t remind me of any other family saga. Digby, the charming male heir, is of course beloved by his parents (especially Rosalind) but that doesn’t create resentment with Flossie and Cristabel. They love him dearly as well, even if it’s for different reasons.

The power of the relationship stood out clearly for me when Flossie, whose nickname for years was Veg (thanks to her parents’ opinion of her looks when she was born) asks them to stop using her nickname. There are plenty of examples where characters can never manage to shake their childhood nickname (a recent re-watch of Notting Hill reminded me of Hugh Grant’s character’s school nickname as Floppy which has followed him well into adulthood) but instead Cristabel, the oldest and leader of their little trio, accepts it with only one comment: if Flossie wanted to change her nickname, she should have just told them sooner.

Most of the early historical details, like World War I, are included as flashbacks for the older generation, but as we follow the siblings, World War II takes center stage in the second half of the novel. As expected, the war changes all of the characters, offering plenty of heartbreak, violence, and fear. But it also makes Flossie head of Chilcombe while Digby becomes a soldier for the French resistance – happy to serve as stagehand and street fighter rather than the star of the show he was in his younger days. Meanwhile, Cristabel’s wartime service highlights how often war will use the labor and lives of the lower class, the poor, and women to ensure victory only to revert them to lower positions once it is over. 

Honestly, I could go on and on about these characters and the powerful, small moments right alongside the deathbed scenes and confessions of love, but I also want to highlight another reason this book is remarkable: Quinn’s stylistic choices. She doesn’t only move between the characters, giving us both an outside and interior perspective on the family members, she also uses newspaper reviews and letters to pass time effectively. In the scene where Rosalind is out dancing in the blitz, the text curves and narrows on the page to follow the bath of the bomb that kills her. But perhaps the most powerful passage, the one I will think about often when I’m reading history books or other novels set in wartime, is when Quinn leaves Chilcombe and our characters behind and simply describes all of the empty households with families all off serving and with unopened and unanswered letters piling up in doorways.

So, what about the titular giant whalebone theatre? Its construction is the point in the novel where I realized this was going to be a bit different from other works I’ve read about this time period and this social circle because young Cristabel, with her attic puppet theatre where she imagines shows, actually does get to build the theatre of her dreams. She wins the whalebones (which should belong to the King but also get picked over by the village and other children) and they get turned into a theatre and then she gets to direct plays. Everyone has their own reasons for supporting this venture and their own relationship to it and it comes up again and again but knowing a child’s almost absurd dream could come true was a very interesting turn for the story to take. In the war, Flossie turns the theatre into a garden (because everything has to become useful) and Cristabel and Digby both carry their love of the stage even as they leave their home theatre behind. In the end, it opens again as a community venue for local children and Cristabel once again gets to imagine a future for it. Quinn seems to be reminding us of the importance of art and imagination, even at moments where they seem inappropriate. Cristabel’s objection to going to the theatre right as the D-Day troops are coming seems natural, and yet somehow the desire for the city to forget the war and focus on the stage for a few hours seems natural too.

So, when you combine all of this together, you can see why I wasn’t thinking about other novels set across the world wars or about other squabbling families in other parts of the English countryside. I was just thinking about this family, about their war experiences, and their relationships. In fact, even after turning the last page it’s been difficult to let them go after spending so much time with them so if you are looking for your next long read, I hope you’ll grab a ticket to The Whalebone Theatre.