I love this book – and have read it at least four times – because it’s hilarious, with an interwoven plot that keeps the reader guessing. It mixes excellent historical scholarship (on England in the Second World War, in the 1880s, and in the mid-fourteenth century), with science fiction, a detective mystery, and two love stories.
The title deliberately echoes Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 classic, hilarious, and inimitable Three Men in a Boat (to say Nothing of the Dog) – but I didn’t re-read that book this year, so can’t list it here. (The original three men and dog make a brief appearance when our hero and friends, plus a dog and a cat, pass them in a boat on the Thames and promptly run into the bank in appropriate style.) And it has a happy ending.
Ned Henry is a time-travelling historian who specialises in the mid-20th century - currently engaged in researching the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. He's also made so many drops into the past that he's suffering from a dangerously advanced case of 'time-lag'.
Unfortunately for Ned, an emergency dash to Victorian England is required and he's the only available historian. But Ned's time-lag is so bad that he's not sure what the errand is - which is bad news since, if he fails, history could unravel around him...
I’ve read this book three or four times, and each time there’s something fresh to enjoy in it.
Published in 1941, it reflects the day-to-day experience of the author and her readers on the ‘Home Front’ of the Second World War in southern England. We see the problems and frustrations of every part of life, but they become bearable thanks to Thirkell’s sense of humour and ability to see the ridiculous in everyday life, turning wartime’s frustrations into hilarious situation comedy.
Thirkell assembles a cast of well-developed, convincing characters who draw our sympathy even as we groan at their failings. When the book was first published, its humour must have helped readers to keep up their morale through the trials of wartime; now it provides an unparalleled insight into their everyday life.
As the war continues it brings its own set of trials to the the village of Northbridge. Eight officers of the Barsetshire Regiment have been billeted at the rectory, and Mrs Villars, the Rector's wife, is finding the attentions of Lieutenant Holden (who doesn't seem to mind that she is married to his host) quite exhausting. The middle-aged ladies and gentlemen who undertake roof-spotting from the church tower are more concerned with their own lives than with any possible parachutist raids. There is the love triangle of Mr Downing, his redoubtable hostess Miss Pemberton and the hospitable Mrs Turner at…
This is a sad book in that the central character dies at the end; the knowledge that this death is inevitable tinges the whole story with melancholy.
Yet it is also a story of hope, of joy in the beauty of nature, and of human endeavour and determination in the face of one of the Earth’s great, inaccessible, wild places.
The story is told so skilfully that the reader forgets she is reading and feels as if she herself is experiencing the story; and Buchan’s compelling descriptions of the landscape of north-west Canada – vast forests, powerful rivers, its local peoples, and its wildlife – remain in the imagination long after the book is finished. The story closes in peace, with a sense of a life well lived and fulfilled.
Sir Edward Leithen - perhaps the autobiographical of Buchan's characters - is dying of tuberculosis and has been given a year to live. After this prognosis, Leithen undertakes a profoundly heroic quest from London to the Canadian Northwest, tracking down a missing man who is literally 'sick at heart'. In the course of this epic journey, Leithen finds redemption for himself.
Sick Heart River is John Buchan's most powerful novel, completed just days before his death. The rich, authentic descriptions of the rugged Canadian landscape were influenced by a voyage down the Mackenzie River in 1937, at which time Buchan…
The medieval crusades needed women: women’s money, prayer support, active participation and inspiration. This book surveys women’s involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when Cyprus, the last crusader state, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women’s actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that (contrary to what many historians have assumed) medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades although the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, this book also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of western Europe and the Muslims of the Middle East, and compares relations between Latin Christians and Muslims with relations between Muslims and other Christian groups.
