 
|
The Tide is RightAuthor: Hugo Charteris British Literature Series March 1991 145 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 paperback / cloth, 0-916583-78-3 / 0-916583-71-6 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $7.96—20% OFF! 
$19.95
|
|
Book Description
This remarkable novel, suppressed in 1957 and published now for the first time, is concerned with a day in the life of a stagnant, aristocratic Scottish family in the 1950s. As the family prepares for its annual Christmas dance, old rivalries and tensions flare as John Harling arrives to visit his sister Mary, who has married Duncan Mackean, next in line to inherit the estate left by Colin Mackean, dead two years now, but very much alive in the memory of the current family, presided over by Alan Mackean and his wife Augustine ("Tin").
By the end of this nerve-racking day, John tells his sister that "this life, which you lead here, is incestuous" and that her husband Duncan "is in love with things he should have left—long ago. Soil, place, family, the past—roots. . . . One must have courage to travel light today." That night, Duncan and Alan go out shooting; only one returns alive.
The reader, like a visitor, is an outsider who must rely on hints, looks, silences, and unspoken sentences to untangle the web of intrigue that binds this fascinating family. Nicholas Mosley, who knew Charteris at school, tells us that the author of The Tide is Right "in his novels . . . tried to describe the complexity of changing attitudes of class-conscious Britain from the inside . . . he wrote not only of the absurdities and irrelevances typical of the British aristocracy but also of the resilience, the earthiness and even the ruthlessness that would enable it in a modified form to survive."
Charteris deserves to be compared to Waugh, especially in A Handful of Dust—the ironies of primogeniture or high jinks in high places—and The Tide is Right should revive his reputation as one of the most significant of postwar British novelists.
About the Author
|
Hugo Charteris (1922-1970) attended Oxford and worked for the London Daily Mail before becoming a full-time writer. In addition to nine novels, he wrote two children's books, short stories, television scripts, and was a frequent contributor to British journals. He was a keen sportsman (hunting, tennis) and practiced photography and vegetable gardening. |
 |
Praise
"Hugo Charteris was among the most gifted British novelists of the postwar generation and The Tide is Right (which was never published in his lifetime) is one of his best books. He wrote, in my opinion, more truthfully about the upper classes than any of his contemporaries. This study of family jealousy and dispossession in an old Scottish landowning family is as exciting as a thriller but its qualities are more than purely narrative. The people and the place are seen with an unmatched intensity and brought to life by a distinctive prose style of rare beauty and extraordinary expressive power."—Francis Wyndham"The Tide is Right is one of Charteris's more elusive books, with a wonderfully perceptive view of upper-class Scottish life. He is, I think, undoubtedly one of the most original, quirky, and shrewd explorers of the behaviour of the landed gentry among postwar English novelists, and at a time when prose was plain, his was idiosyncratically stylish, capable of suggesting comedy, tragedy, and romance with fastidious economy."—Alan Ross, London Magazine
"Charteris is a curious novelist, an odd man out among his generally predictable contemporaries. He is both original and banal, straightforward and complicated, topical and old-fashioned, derivative and original; a Greene obsessed with irrelevancies, a Firbank who reads the newspapers, an elusive, allusive, elliptical writer with the courage to tackle glaringly obvious problems head-on, and the ingenuity to stand them on their heads."—Francis Hope, Observer
"Charteris's novels have a flavour of melancholy which resolves itself into ironical comedy . . . a prevailing sense of a class, a society, decomposing . . . well written and well observed, in places very funny, full of shrewd comment on our times."—Malcolm Muggeridge, Observer