Epic, moving and informative, Joanna Quinn's The Whalebone Theatre is one for the ages. Quinn's story is chronological, taking readers from 1919 through the end of World War 2, via the unusual and memorable Seagrave family.
Set near Dorset, a seaside British town, The three Seagrave children living on their family's grand estate find a whale. It has washed up on the beach near their home, called Chilcombe, and the children wish to claim it. The bones of the whale eventually become part of a theatre they've made, with the help of the adults living at Chilcombe.
The children, Christabel, Flossie, and Digby are "burdened with adult foolishness" and therefore close with one another. They don't have much parenting as the adults seem more concerned with throwing roaring parties than caretaking, and the three busy themselves creating plays in their theatre.
Christobel, the oldest, is their fearless leader navigating their way through childhood dotted with the comings and goings of artists, poets, stray children, and socialites. The children's relationship with each other is sweet and their observations are funny. At one point, in an enumerated chapter titled "facts learnt by children", they note while spying on a party that "servants repeatedly dispatched below stairs to fetch cigars, champagne and port can and do swear in many fascinating ways under their breath".
As the story progresses through time, Christabel, Flossie and Digby each play their respective roles in the war. Christa joins the Women's Auxiliary Air Force tracking German air strikes, Flossie joins the Women's Land Army, working gardens for the food deprived wartime country, and Digby signs up for the British Army. These roles morph and evolve with the war, taking Christabel and Digby into occupied France for dangerous and harrowing undercover work.
Each of the Seagrave grown children personify a comment someone once makes to Christabel: "war allows us to rise in ways that would otherwise be impossible". Their courage and humanity are illustrated in a myriad of ways as they take their stance in the resistance against Hitler's Germany. The war mounts to a crescendo and the saga eventually circles back to Chilcombe and their theatre.
The Whalebone Theatre is five hundred and fifty-five pages of adventurous, poetically written historical fiction. Joanna Quinn's knowledge and research about the second world war is transfixing. The character development is sublime, and the storyline had me weeping. I give this wonderful saga five stars out of five. https://youtube.com/shorts/DzPYMhHniZw?si=Bx75bXfZdBcCWYEK
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