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The Whalebone Theatre: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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If the front of Taras is the artist-entertainer, the back reveals the lifter-labourer – the graft behind the artistry. For a brief moment, a door opens and we get a spark of the electricity Sarah Waters generated in her wartime novel, The Night Watch. There you have the main cast members: Cristabel; her half sister, Flossie (The Veg); Flossie’s half brother, Digby; Flossie and Digby’s stylish mother, Rosalind; and Willoughby, Digby’s dashing father, who’s mostly dashing off. I picked this up without any expectations and came away feeling like I'd spent years with this vibrant fictional family. Besides being a major site of conflict for the war efforts, Paris has a specific character that’s distinctive from how the war is felt in England.

There are also some lovingly acute descriptions of nature, like the ‘sea foam popping on pebbles’ on the shore. It is from this decaying dead whale that the rib bones are extracted, which in time become the theater where Cristabel stages plays with cast and crew culled from family, staff and houseguests (a dramatic American poetess, a burly Russian expat artist and his semi-savage offspring). Nothing new about WWII that we haven’t already read was offered as the children grew into adults and the Second World War erupted. I will say that, having finished the novel just this moment, I am simultaneously wrung out and filled up.

Gorgeous and a little breathless, with luscious food scenes from beginning to end — enough cake and pudding for a thousand Carvels — “The Whalebone Theatre” could have been tighter corseted.

Sure enough, once Rosalind produces a child of her own, a baby girl promptly dubbed The Veg for her unpromising appearance, Cristabel’s father falls off a horse and dies, leaving her an orphan, and Rosalind with an attenuated fortune, a moldering mansion and a charming brother-in-law to console her. How do the main women --- Cristabel, Rosalind, Flossie --- defy being forgotten in the way that establishments might want them to be?The story follows the oddly structured Seagrave family, genteel aristocrats with a slowly failing estate and a brood of loosely related siblings who will inherit this mess and have to figure it out. It's impossible not to be charmed by this book, its cast of characters, and Quinn's constantly striking prose. It's a bit of a shame, because the writing is clear and the descriptions are good and it's evocative as a whole; it's just that it's evocative of dozens of books and films and TV series that have come before.

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