Dornford Yates was a reliable purveyor of interwar thrillers and romances. He knew exactly what readers wanted and he provided it in lavish dishes: handsome, rugged heroes; beautiful, plucky heroines; sleek cars smoothly speeding through lonely landscapes; rough, thuggish villains; Ruritanian conspiracies; fisticuffs, chases, kidnaps, secret treasures. There is no subtlety or ambiguity about his work: his heroes look, speak and act like his ideal of English gentlemen, whereas his villains are ugly customers with coarse speech, clothes and manners. There is none of the atmospheric shading of a Graham Greene or Eric Ambler thriller.
The great success of his novels can be gauged in any second-hand bookshop that stocks vintage fiction: at the alphabetical end of the shelves there will often be a dozen or so of Yates keeping strange company with the Francis Brett Youngs. At the same time as this commercial allure, his prose was often thought of as distinguished, admired by literary eminences such as Cyril Connolly. It has the exactitude, formal quality and occasionally archaic phraseology that might be expected from Yates’ profession as a barrister. He also wrote light romantic comedies featuring his urbane man-about-town Berry, which equally had keen enthusiasts.
The Stolen March, which celebrates its centenary this month, has many of the thriller ingredients listed above, but unusually for Yates it also has a more bizarre dimension, and becomes in fact a remarkable alternate-world fantasy. A young couple on a freewheeling holiday on the Continent fall in with a young woman who has become embroiled with jewellery thieves and international criminals, and (separately) an archaeologist writing a study of The Saracen in France, a nice addition to the library of imaginary books. The young couple have heard stories of Etchechuria. ‘the Lost Country’, an enclave between France and Spain, that may or may not exist: “fabulous only because it could not be found. And it was never found because it was believed to be fabulous.” It is not shown on maps, and yet there is a discrepancy in the French and Spanish borders which seems to leave a piece of country belonging to neither. The title is a pun on the word ‘march’ meaning a border country, as in the Welsh Marches.
Clearly, one model is Andorra, the Pyrenean republic which has dual administration between the French government and a Spanish bishop. But Yates’ country is by no means a direct fictional version of Andorra, and is not quite in the same location, to the extent that it is anywhere in this world. Toying with the reader's expectations, Yates approaches the strange domain gradually, so that at first we simply seem to be in a picturesque back-of-beyond place.
But soon his depiction of Etchechria becomes highly fanciful. From the moment they cross an unseen border his characters are in an Alice-in-Wonderland world with peculiar laws and customs, full of curious figures, often with grandiose titles, who talk in paradox and metaphor. The effect is quite Chestertonian, with a dash of William Morris.This is a beguiling idea and it offers a completely different dimension to what would otherwise be a fairly routine thriller.
Yates writes quite a lot of banter between the four main characters, and between them and and the eccentric courtiers they meet, which is presented as being very funny: his heroines are often described as in tears of laughter. I’m not sure it’s a good tactic, when you are being facetious, to keep nudging the reader in this way, particularly when it goes on a bit. Badinage can help to season prose if it is brief and zestful, as Wodehouse knew, but Yates gives entire chapters of it. Even so, the absurd and Humpty-Dumptyish dialogue is certainly inventive.
His protagonists do not quite know whether they are in some fantasy world, or caught up in some elaborate hoax, or visiting some particularly quaint and forgotten corner of Europe: “It’s all been a dream . . .,” says one, “It must have. Damn it, the thing’s impossible. We’ve been asleep or something, We’ve dreamed of Kings and Jesters and Invisible Cloaks. We’ve walked with spirits—our minds have been possessed.” Certainly, Yates does not stint the fantasy elements, and the book would not have been entirely out of place in the Pan Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, alongside Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-a-Mist, with which it has some affinities in tone. This is a most unusual departure for the author, not at all like his typical purposeful, plot-driven thrillers. I had a sense he was enjoying unfurling a previously unsuspected fantastical side of his imagination.
My copy has a pencilled note at the end of the novel, on the foot of the last page: “A sequel entitled ‘The Tempered Wind’ was begun but not finished and never published”, with a reference to Yates’ autobiography, B-Berry and I Look Back (1958). As far as I know, this has still not been published.
(Mark Valentine)
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