Review: THE PASSENGER FROM CALAIS by Arthur Griffiths

Original Publication Date: 1906
 
Genre: Adventure
 
Topics: Rule of law, honor among thieves, travel, trains, love, motherhood, women























 
Review by heidenkind:

Lieut.-Colonel Basil Annesley, traveling to Lake Como for some R&R, hops aboard the train from Calais only to find that the train is completely empty of any other passengers, except for one small party consisting of a lady, her maid, and a baby. When he overhears the lady confessing to a theft, he decides she's bad news and that he's going to have nothing to do with her. After she tells him off for being a judgmental douche canoe, however, the Colonel abruptly realizes two things: 1. he IS being a douche canoe; and 2. he's totally in love with this woman and will do anything to help her, despite the fact that he still doesn't know who she is, what she stole, or why. Will the larcenous party be able to evade the private investigators on the lady's trail, and will the Colonel's feelings for her survive the trip?

I was so pleasantly surprised by The Passenger from Calais! It's a game of cat-and-mouse stretching across Europe in an extended chase that reminded me of Around the World in 80 Days–only better, because it includes several awesome female characters. There are fights, run-ins with the law, a slippery villain, double- and triple-crosses, and identity switches. The story takes an unexpectedly feminist turn in the middle, and I thought the ending was pitch-perfect despite an all-too-convenient death.

Even though the Colonel seems a bit dense at the beginning of The Passenger from Calais (his abrupt one-eighty in regards to the mysterious lady was enough to give me whiplash), as the book goes on he proves himself to be a clever and worthy adversary to the people chasing the woman. The story isn't only told from his viewpoint, however: we also hear parts of the story from Falfani and Tiler, the detectives, as well as the lady herself. The switching of viewpoints was confusing sometimes, especially listening to the book on audio, but that's my only real criticism of The Passenger.

The rest of this review is going to be spoilerific, so if you want to read The Passenger from Calais and still be surprised by some of the twists and turns, you may want to avert your eyes.



As for the mysterious woman on the train–whose name is Lady Claire Standish–I absolutely loved her. She's intelligent, capable, steady, and 100% principled even though she *did* steal something. The something that she stole is where the book takes that unexpectedly feminist turn I mentioned.

See, Lady Claire's sister, Henriette, married the vicious Lord Blackadder (cue Blackadder gifs), and several years later was just as unfairly divorced by him, resulting in a huge scandal. Naturally Blackadder got custody of their child, and made it known that he would never allow Henriette to see the little munchkin again. So, while her sister hied off to the Continent, Claire and her maid took her nephew from the house of Blackadder and planned to reunite mother and child in Italy.

So not only is the plot generated by the actions of two women, it centers around a woman's right to have access to her children as well as chose her own husband and maintain her own autonomy (Henriette was forced to marry Blackadder by her guardians, and the divorce hinged on rumors of infidelity sparked by her daring to socialize with men other than her husband). Not only that, but Annesley immediately and genuinely recognizes the women's plight as a just cause.

Blackadder is just as horrible as you can imagine. At one point he pulls the, "Do you know who I AM?!" card with a French official, which I think we can all recognize as a stupid move. The French judge's reaction to it, however, made the scene totally worth it.

And then there's Henriette. When we first meet her it's through the eyes of Colonel Annesley, and she's definitely a Difficult Woman. Completely unlike her sister, she is not cool, calm, and logical in the face of adversity. She's histrionic, temperamental, emotional, and refuses to listen to reason. Colonel Annesley thinks she's a harridan, actually, and when he's telling the story you can understand why Blackadder might have wanted to divorce her.

Lady Henriette is also very suspicious of men in general–understandable, all things considered, but not something I encounter a lot in older novels. Henriette and Claire are painfully aware of the power imbalance between men and women, and Henriette takes care to point it out (in the most annoying way possible, of course):

"Oh, how like a man! Of course you must have your own way, and every one else must give in to you," she cried with aggravating emphasis, giving me no credit for trying to choose the wisest course.

Why should she give you credit, dude? She don't know you. Lady Henriette is sick of doing what the goddamn patriarchy tells her to do. SICK OF IT.

What's interesting is that when Claire's telling the story, Henriette is still difficult and unreasonable, but much more sympathetic. And by the end Henriette redeems herself by taking the initiative to find the people who testified against her in the divorce trial and convince them to confess to the authorities they were bribed by Blackadder, which means everyone can to return to England.

Basically, Claire and Henriette each possess certain attributes of a classic femme fatale (that's certainly what I thought Claire would be when The Passenger from Calais started), but they're not the femme fatales–they're the heroines! Annesley really just provides a supporting role to their adventure.



Despite a few little too-convenient blips now and again, I really enjoyed The Passenger from Calais. I can imagine this book as movie directed by Wes Anderson, à la The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I loved that movie. I'd definitely recommend this novel!



Download The Passenger from Calais by Arthur Griffiths at Project Gutenberg|Librivox

Guest Review: THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

Original Publication Date: 1905

Genre: Adventure, historical fiction

Topics: the French Revolution, trust, rule of law













Review by Kay of Kay's Bookshelf:

Summary: A novel about a brave and noble Englishman who, together with his little group of faithful friends, repeatedly risked his life saving French aristocrats from the guillotine. The success of their enterprise is based on the fact that no one knows the identity of the leader. Now, however, a French agent knows just the way to unmask him: he makes one of the ladies at the English court an offer she cannot refuse — either she finds out who the famed hero is, or her brother dies.

General impression: I don’t know what to make of this. I feel like it has this great potential and yet all the interesting parts are missing.

Setting: The year is 1792, a short while after the French revolution. Beheadings happen every day, as the people, drunk on their new-found freedom, are also thirsty for revenge on their former oppressors. On the other side of the channel, the English are horrified at the news of the bloodshed. The King, the Prince of Wales, and the rest of the political leaders are as yet undecided whether they should openly condemn France’s behavior or just keep quiet, not to risk a conflict. However, a bunch of English young people have decided to do more that just decry the situation: they spend their time working up schemes to smuggle the unfortunate “aristos” from their now hostile motherland to the safety of the British soil. Their leader, who calls himself The Scarlet Pimpernel (after a humble little red roadside flower), is a paragon of resourcefulness and a master of disguise — which is how he managed to keep his identity hidden for so long.

It is obvious that the author herself is firmly on the aristocrats’ side, being openly against the ‘regular people’. The former are gracious, well bred, and the ones we root for; the latter are dirty and mean. The reason for that became obvious when I read about the author’s early life: of noble descent herself (her father was a Baron, her mother a Countess), she and her family left her native Hungary in 1868 as they were afraid of a peasants’ revolution.

Characters: As a sidenote, the dialogue was awfully sprinkled with interjections. It felt like there hardly ever was a sentence without a “Lud!” or “Zooks!” or “Bah!” or “Odd’s fish!” or something such. While at times there was indeed the need to show someone’s surprise, or Marguerite’s pretend flippancy, having basically every character exclaim something every few minutes became tiring after a while.

As for the characters, I felt them more cardboard-y than anything else. Marguerite St. Just/Blakeney, for example, is not only a very beautiful woman but is also considered the wittiest in Europe(!). Alas, this last part remains unproven, although we spend about half the book reading her inner thoughts. All she thinks about is the fact that she loves the hero, and oh, how she betrayed him — but she loves him so much! More and more every passing minute! And to think she has betrayed him! Him whom she loves so much! — and so on and so forth. Surely, she does show courage (or is it merely recklessness?) when she follows the love of her life straight to France, where it wasn’t safe for her, but then, other than following the soldiers she does absolutely nothing to actually help. This is one of the missing parts I complained about in the beginning — the fact that we, the readers, are not actually shown the rescue operation — which happens to be the most interesting part of the book, as the Pimpernel has pledged his honor to rescue some French aristocrat, and he does not know that the area is surrounded with soldiers. The pages that should deal with that are dedicated to Marguerite’s thoughts, and as she follows the soldiers she can only see what they see — which is naturally nothing, else the rescue would not have taken place. We only find out about what happened near the very end, in a few sentences, as the brave rescuer explains to Marguerite how he accomplished the feat. But I would have liked to see it myself, to hold my breath and keep my fingers crossed all throughout :(

The Scarlet Pimpernel is a very romantic, dashing hero: a noble, mysterious man who risks his life in order to save others’. He also possesses an insurmountable pride, that sometimes gets the best of him, an intensity of feeling of the kind one sees only in books1, a presence of mind that never betrays him and a rather superhuman physical strength. Oh, and of course he’s good looking too. And a good actor with a gift for accents, which is how he manages to fool the French police for so long. There isn’t anything this guy can’t do, which is why after a point he stops being an actual person, becoming a sort of parody instead. A male Mary Sue, if you wish. And to think that, for all his perfection, we didn’t get to see him being a hero. I imagine the book would have been so much interesting had it been told from his POV. *sigh*

As a bit of trivia, the villain, the French agent that spares no efforts in his hunt for the Scarlet Pimpernel is actually a real-life character, although the author is said to have stretched history around him quite a bit.

Relationships: Ah, yet another one of those parts I found sorely lacking. As the book opens, Marguerite St. Just has been Lady Blakeney for about a year. She despises her husband, which she finds dull and incapable of passion. This despite the fact that his intense passion for her was the very reason she married him in the first place (in short, he was very much in love with her, but she had some secret and he judged her for it, and she was too proud to explain her reasoning to him, so apparently he stopped loving her, just like that). I would have liked to see their courtship, to see them as a couple, as when the book opens they are very much apart.

And then one evening all of a sudden Marguerite talks to her husband (had they never talked before?). And his behavior gives away the fact that he still loves her, and all of a sudden Marguerite realizes that, wait, she loves him too! Despite the fact that up until then she barely looked at him, and that she mocked him on every occasion. Despite the fact that a bit earlier we’re told how she married him because she thought that he loved her so much she could grow to love him in return. And now she realizes she had loved him all this while? This would have been easier to believe if I had seen her ever caring for him before — in a scene before their marriage, perhaps — but as it were it seemed somewhat of a stretch.

Thoughts on the ending: I was particularly amused by one of the last few sentences:

But it is on record that at the brilliant wedding of Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, Bart., with Mlle. Suzanne de Tournay de Basserive, a function at which H. R. H. the Prince of Wales and all the ELITE of fashionable society were present, the most beautiful woman there was unquestionably Lady Blakeney, whilst the clothes of [The Scarlet Pimpernel] were the talk of the JEUNESSE DOREE of London for many days.

The Scarlet Pimpernel has many manly qualities, probably all of them. He has a soft spot however, and that is his love for expensive clothes. As such, a truly happy ending for him could not have existed without everyone’s admiring his clothes, right? :)

Other than that everything’s pretty textbook stuff, the good and the brave are rewarded, the evil plans are foiled. I don’t think anyone expected otherwise. :)

Recommend it to? People interested in the classics, I guess. It has a 4.05 rating on Goodreads, so the vast majority of people seems to have liked it.