... comes with an unexpected 21st-century sensibility so that it feels modern rather than homage-like and is bursting with energy and zip ... Honestly, I want to sound a trumpet and put out some flags. It is pure heaven from first word to last. It’s a debut novel, incredibly for something so assured and fully realised, although it did take the author something like ten years to write ... There are scandals and affairs, heartbreak, longing, a brilliant description of the long, slow fade of love based on desire, and a devastating explanation of why Jasper is as he is. (I have never read a more moving description of how and why a sweet little boy might turn into a pompous prig. Quinn is superb at explaining broken hearts of all types, and hearts generally) ... Quinn’s writing throughout is . . . the word I keep coming back to is 'generous'. It’s as though she had made the reader the most lavish and delicious cake, with layers of cream and so much fruit that it spills out on to the plate. Although a cake perhaps suggests a cloying sweetness. There is no cloying; this is lucid storytelling. Here is the world, Quinn seems to say, in all its glory and misery, its tiny little joys and its great dollops of pain — all of it valuable and there for the taking, to make of what you will ... one of those books that has you hooting with laughter one minute (although the laughter is never unkind, which is a whole other skill; you never snigger) and feeling absolutely floored the next, not just because of the meanderings of the plot or Quinn’s acute emotional intelligence, but because she is one of those writers who has her finger on humanity’s pulse. An absolute treat of a book, to be read and reread.
Most first novels that clock in at nearly 600 pages smack of self-indulgence on the author's part and prove a slog for the reader. In contrast, Joanna Quinn's epic debut is an immersive, capacious delight. Quinn, who teaches creative writing and lives on the Dorset coast, excels with the nuts and bolts of her craft — characterization, pace, plotting, and well calibrated humor and suspense — and brilliantly depicts the rugged beauty of her county 'on the crumbling bottom edge of England' ... Quinn takes a risk by serving up two markedly different halves — the first mapping an idiosyncratic childhood, the second chronicling wartime danger and adventure. But Cristabel, who emerges from the book's bustling cast to be its main protagonist, provides the necessary link ... Quinn makes sure the other characters around Cristabel are just as vividly delineated ... a supremely accomplished feat of storytelling. After ending on a dramatic high, Quinn leaves her readers eagerly anticipating her next act.
This is a charming and moving debut novel from a talented writer. Even minor characters are well-developed—often idiosyncratic but always believable. There is a good deal of humour in the earlier parts of the novel, as the children navigate the strange world of adults ... The children are, perhaps, a little precocious ... There’s a tiny historical error in one of the flashbacks ... I quite like the experimental layout of the type during some key scenes, though some readers may balk at it. There are also some lovingly acute descriptions of nature ... I’m looking forward to seeing what Quinn comes up with next. Highly recommended.
These spunky, somewhat benignly neglected children, with a pedigree stretching from Charles Dickens to Lemony Snicket, might seem familiar, but they have their own peculiar and particular charm, as do the supporting cast of flamboyant visitors, eccentric locals and unflappable family retainers. And when the drama shifts to wartime footing, that familiarity, so lovingly recast and cultivated, has secured our affection for these characters and our interest in the new roles they assume ... For all its theatricality and amusements, outsize and intimate, The Whalebone Theatre is most interesting and moving as the story of these siblings, Cristabel in particular, making something of their own out of the material they’ve been given, finding their rightful place in a drama not always of their own making. Which is to say, because it’s all made up, after all, the real performance here is Joanna Quinn’s. What’s remarkable, especially for a first novel, is her deft way of depicting this lost world — whether a subsiding seaside aristocracy or a training school for British agents or a Parisian theater in wartime — convincingly enough to let us see it simply as a setting for the unfolding drama. Her vision is so fine and fully realized that it’s hard to imagine her doing anything else — and hard to have to wait to see what that might be.
... a lush, roving William Boyd-style novel. Slightly alarmingly, it is the the Dorset writer Joanna Quinn’s debut (although she has been working on it for nearly a decade, apparently) — how on earth is she this good? You know what? Who cares. Just dive in and slurp it up ... full of brilliant set pieces — an endless summer afternoon when forbidden lovers find themselves finally alone on a beach; the sudden suspicion of the Nazi official when the weary spy blunders — that pop and crackle with tension ... Quinn handles her sprawling cast with ease and compassion. No one is irredeemable or unexplainable ... Quinn is particularly good on the stupidities of aristocracy ... It’s beautifully written too ... Quinn has fun mucking around with the boring old novel format. She smushes letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings and an exhibition catalogue into the prose (a very Boydian trick), but always for a reason ... Occasionally I got fed up with the whole 20th-century tragedy through the eyes of an aristocratic family formula: it’s overdone and it makes people who live in big houses and do nothing look glamorous and interesting. It’s a bit hard to get past the fact that the three heroes of this story are called Cristabel, Florence and Digby, however much you love them. But Quinn is no fusty, Debrett’s-thumbing apologist, and cleverly she threads the hope of the destruction of the old class system into the tragedy of war. Something rotted away can be repurposed anew, like the whale on a Dorset beach that gives the novel its name. It’s that simple. It’s that clever.
Taking up toy weapons and disdainful of marriage plots, Cristabel is outlined in the endearing if slightly stock shape of unconventional heroine ... Shimmeringly if sometimes a little preciously, Quinn depicts the strange, resourceful magic that can be conjured by a cluster of children when they’re neglected by selfish adults ... 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. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like 'Toodle-pip, darlings!' The weather, whether misty or stormy, dappling sunshine or 'moonlight falling through the window like an invitation,' is consistently impressive ... Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced ... The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith ... 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. But Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold, boding more commanding work to come.
It is Taras who encourages Cristabel to cultivate her artistic inclinations and put on a play. This initiates one of the book’s themes of play-acting, which runs right through from Rosalind, valiantly pretending to be a happy wife and mother, to the English agents in the second world war, when a far more serious pretence is required from those parachuted in to occupied France. Quinn hammers this home a little too hard at times, but it’s a pleasing device ... However, Quinn never pushes the idea far enough to make the reader catch her breath – and that’s the weakness of the novel, which despite its engaging storytelling cannot match the likes of models such as Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles or Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. Quinn simply doesn’t take enough risks. She has her characters narrate in turn, which means they have no secrets from us; she makes them likable, with few hidden resentments or schemes. The older generation don’t alter as they age, dropping out of the narrative as they cease to be interesting. The younger ones are better treated in that they mature and undergo life-altering challenges; but the main driver of tension in their story comes from historical events ... There are moments when we get a glimpse of something more invigorating ... This is partly down to Quinn’s decision to portray early 20th-century society as progressive and liberal-minded. Homophobia and class prejudice are never articulated. This gives the book a cosy, teatime feeling: delightful to indulge in, but denying us the thrill of fear that comes when characters are really up against it. It’s only when those reliable baddies the Nazis come into play that the adrenaline flows ... a grand story, sensitively told; Quinn is surely capable of so much more, if she can only bring herself to break a few more bones on her stage.
The emotional upheaval of the interwar years in England is dramatized afresh in Quinn’s dazzling and imaginative debut ... Thorny, idiosyncratic Cristabel is a formidable first among equals in this expansive cast of memorable eccentrics. Peacetime whimsy gracefully segues into scenes of unbearable tension and heart-wrenching suspense as Cristabel boldly infiltrates Paris on the eve of its liberation ... a reading experience to be long cherished.
The war that begins just as the children enter adulthood sweeps them apart and turns Quinn's debut into what feels almost like a different book entirely, driven by fear and suspense rather than whimsy and humor, with scenes of espionage and violence careening toward what one suspects is inevitable tragedy. Which, to be fair, is exactly the sort of thing war does in real life. Told partly with letters, lists, and scrapbook cuttings, there's something old-fashioned about this novel, even in its handling of its stubborn, independent female lead, a Jo March type, if Jo March joined the British special forces and became a secret agent in France ... This big, old-fashioned, seriocomic 'crumbling estate' family saga works best before the war comes along.
