Call of the Curlew by Elizabeth Brooks Reviews
Elizabeth Brooks' novel, Phone call of the Curlew (besides published as The Orphan of Common salt Winds), caught my heart whilst browsing in the library. I don't think I had heard of it before, but later reading the blurb and the various reviews dotted over its embrace – Eowyn Ivey calling it 'bewitching' was plenty for me – I was suitably intrigued, and took it habitation with me.
On New year's day'southward Eve in 1939, Virginia is 10 years sometime. She is an orphan, whose parents passed away when she was just an infant. At this betoken in time, she is being taken to the 'mysterious' grand house, Table salt Winds, to begin a new life with her adoptive parents, Clem and Lorna Wrathmell. The house borders a salt flat named Tollbury Marsh in the East of England, a 'beautiful but dangerous place'.
At kickoff, the 2nd World State of war, which has just begun, feels far away from the Wrathmells' secluded domicile. However, whispers in the nearby town regarding the local knife grinder, a Jewish German language homo, begin to spread, and something sinister simmers below the idyllic surroundings. The German plane crashing into the marsh is a real turning point for Virginia; her adoptive father goes to rescue the pilot and does non return. As she kickoff waits hopefully for his return, so begins to grieve Clem, she realises that she is as embroiled in war every bit anyone else.
When the plane comes downward, Brooks writes, rather beautifully: 'It was the grace of the thing that astonished her in retrospect. Yous'd expect a called-for fighter plane to make a great hullabaloo: howling engines, roaring flames, a corking boom every bit it hit the ground, nose first. Merely if this one made any noise at all, Virginia didn't observe. All she recalled, later on, was the slow arc it traced through the sky on its way down, like a spark floating from a bonfire. Even the explosion was gentle from their vantage signal: a little orangish flower that budded, bloomed and withered, all in a moment, far away on the edge of the marsh.'
I establish the narrative within Call of the Curlew wonderfully beguiling. The opening paragraph, which is set at the cease of 2015, really sets the scene: 'Virginia Wrathmell knows she will walk on to the marsh one New year's Eve, and meet her finish there. She'southward known it for years. Through adolescence and adulthood she's spent the last days of December on edge, waiting for a sign. And so when 1 finally arrives, in her eighty-sixth year, there's no good reason to feel dismayed.' This sign turns out to be the skull of a curlew, which she finds on her doorstep. 'All these years,' Brooks writes, 'she'due south been wondering what the sign will turn out to exist, and she'south come up up with the strangest ideas. Words forming on a misted window. An bearding note. A ghost. She'south never imagined anything equally perfect as a curlew's skull.'
Despite the air of mystery near it, there is a really comforting warmth to exist found within Brooks' prose. The descriptions, of which there are many, are wonderfully vivid: 'Virginia glanced at the flatness to her left, where the silence lay. It was also nighttime to run across the silhouette-bird now. The deep, arctic blue of the sky was reflected, here and in that location, in streaks of water, and in that location was a unmarried star in the sky, simply everything was blackness.'
Brooks has such control when she shifts Virginia'south story from the present day to the past, and so dorsum over again. Given this construction, we learn a lot about the 2 Virginias rather apace; the sometimes crotchety, headstrong old lady, and the curious young girl. Although Virginia is the author'southward focus, other characters become clear too, as do their relationships with one another. It is obvious from the outset, for instance, that Clem and Lorna's marriage contains a keen bargain of upset, and is fraught with issues.
I found Call of the Curlew wholly absorbing; it is the best kind of historical novel, in that you sink into it. Its landscape is so clear, and its characters hold a cracking deal of interest. I enjoyed the omniscient perspective, which allowed Brooks to shift from ane individual to another, whilst never losing sight of Virginia and her thoughts and feelings. I loved the air of mystery, and the many things left unspoken until far later in the novel. I was defenseless up in Virginia's story from the get-go. The threads of story which weave throughout take been beautifully layered, and it put me in listen of other authors which I have always enjoyed, namely Kate Morton and Helen Humphreys. I would highly recommend Phone call of the Curlew to anyone looking for a historical fiction fix.
Source: https://theliterarysisters.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/call-of-the-curlew-by-elizabeth-brooks/
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