In
1903, Erskine Childers did something profound: he
wrote the world’s first great seagoing spy
thriller. But The Riddle of the Sands opens
so quietly that a reader might think that Childers
himself didn’t know what he was creating.
As the novel begins,
it is late September, and its protagonist –
who goes by the name Carruthers to conceal his true
identity – is stuck in London. It’s
an especially lonely season, he tells us. His friends
(for what they’re worth) are on holiday, and
due to “a caprice on the part of a remote
and mighty personage,” he is left at his desk
in the Foreign Office to do work that
consisted chiefly…in
smoking cigarettes, in saying that Mr So-and-So
was away and would be back October 1st, in being
absent for lunch from twelve till two, and in
my spare moments making précis –
let us say – the less confidential consular
reports, and squeezing the results into cast-iron
schedules.
Unfortunately,
while he is slated to take a holiday, he has nowhere
to go. He is, he tells us, “at the extremity
of depression.” Frankly, Carruthers is so
comically moody that the first chapter reads a bit
like the opening to an especially cranky Jerome
K. Jerome novel. (Two Men in a Yacht, anyone?)
Soon, though,
a letter arrives that changes his plans –
and the expected course of the book – profoundly.
A university friend – whom Carruthers calls
Davies to protect his true identity – has
invited him on a yachting holiday in the Baltic.
Of course, Carruthers finds many things to criticize
in the offer, but as he tells himself, “There
was certainly no alternatives at hand. And to bury
myself in the Baltic at this unearthly time of year
had at least a smack of tragic thoroughness about
it.”
Naturally, the
yacht turns out to be a tiny, bedraggled affair,
and the neat yachtsman’s outfit that Carruthers
has brought is absurdly out of place. Looking around
his quarters, Carruthers reflects back on earlier
yacht outings:
Hazily there
floated through my mind my last embarkation on
a yacht; my faultless attire, the trim gig and
obsequious sailors, the accommodation ladder flashing
with varnish and brass in the August sun; the
orderly, snowy decks and basket chairs under the
awning aft. What a contrast with this sordid midnight
scramble, over damp meat and littered packing-cases!
The bitterest touch of all was a growing sense
of inferiority and ignorance which I had never
before been allowed to feel in my experience of
yachts.
Despite our natural
tendency to project a novelist’s perspective
onto his protagonist, it’s actually Davies
that Childers more closely resembles, at least when
it comes to seafaring skills. And the reading experience
gains immeasurably by it because Childers draws
on his own seagoing experiences to construct a yachting
adventure that convinces even sea-hardened readers
that they’re reading the real thing. Here,
for example, he describes a particularly bumpy passage
through storms:
Every loose
article in the boat became audibly restless. Cans
clinked, cupboards rattled, lockers uttered hollow
groans. Small things sidled out of dark hiding-places,
and danced grotesque drunken figures on the floor,
like goblins in a haunted glade. The mast whined
dolorously at every heel, and the centre-board
hiccoughed and choked.
In time, Carruthers
discovers Davies isn’t as carefree as he seems,
and in the process of sizing up a yachtsman Davies
swears is a spy, the two stumble onto a German plot
to invade England’s coastline. While Childers
approaches this discovery slowly, the story quickly
picks up speed once it’s revealed. And the
German plot proved so convincing that the British
government took note.
As realistic as
the German plot is, though, at least some of the
novel’s believability lies in Childers’s
understated approach to the genre. It was not, he
wrote to a friend, particularly easy to create.
It is a yachting
story, with a purpose, suggested by a cruise I
once took in German Waters. I discover a scheme
of invasion directed against England. I find it
horribly difficult, as being in the nature of
a detective story, there is no sensation, only
what is meant to be convincing fact. I was weak
enough to ‘spatchcock’ a girl into
it and now find her a horrible nuisance.
The notion of
writing a thriller whose voice is factually convincing
and largely lacking sensationalism is easily accepted
by contemporary readers, though it flummoxed a few
reviewers when The Riddle of the Sands
first appeared. (The Scotsman’s reviewer even
questioned its genre, writing, “One hesitates
to class this book as fiction.”) Nor, sadly,
are we surprised today to find a girl ‘spatchcocked’
into a thriller.
The Riddle
of the Sands was to be Childers’s only
novel. He served as a clerk in the House of Commons
until 1910, and nine years later, he moved to Dublin,
where he avidly supported the Irish Home Rule movement.
The involvement proved to be short-lived, though.
In 1922, Childers was court-martialed by the Irish
Provisional Government for carrying a pistol given
to him by Michael Collins, and he was executed by
firing squad a week later.
The political
pamphlets he wrote have long since been forgotten,
but The Riddle of the Sands remains a superbly
compelling read. |