Challenge by V. Sackville-West (1923)

What a peculiar book - in one sense. But a familiar one in another - which is the author's singlemindedness in pursuing the story. There's no sense here of cynical manipulation. Her previous three books of fiction have included two Hardyesque novels and then a collection of stories which seemed to indicate a move toward the more immediate and intimate in terms of style. How wrong I was! This novel is a throwback to begin with - to the Ruritanian stylings of Anthony Hope and even E. F. Benson. It is set in a fictional tiny republic in or around the Greek coastline given the confusing name Herakleion - which is actually a town in northern Crete. Off the coast of Herakleion are the Zachary Islands which have an on-again-off-again relationship with it in terms of belonging. There is a large thrust in the first two parts of this novel toward describing the diplomatic community in the tiny capital, partly at least in mildly humorous terms - the various emissaries and VIPs jostle for standing, feud, and have marked contrasts of character. Backgrounding this is the author's trademark hard earnestness, this time in relation to a small group of mainly English inmates and their families, circling around the Davenant family. Julian Davenant, the young, university educated, idealistic, impetuous son of the British ambassador has a complicated relationship with his beautiful cousin Eve, where he mistrusts her selfishness and imperiousness but adores her beauty and originality. In the third part, when Julian has been convinced that he should lead an uprising of the Islands against a newly-elected unsympathetic president of Herakleion (his family have a long history of connection with them), the narrative closes in on the relationship between Julian and Eve, whom he has taken there with him. Like her second novel, but with not quite the same strangeness, this is the point where there is a sense of overheating and superpassion. Suddenly we move from the urbane world to the passionate one, closing in on the machinations of their intense and contradictory feelings for one another, revealed in extremely heightened language. Then there is a plot twist, fuelled by jealousy, which brings about a violent conclusion, an escape and a death at sea. Storm in a teacup? Almost. True to its own design? Definitely.