"Half of the Human Race" by Anthony Quinn

This historical boy-meets-girl  romance ticks all the genre boxes.

1911. He's a wealthy public school boy and talented cricketer. She's a suffragette wannabe female surgeon. They fall in love. But. She is fighting against the entrenched values of the patriarchy; he is the establishment. He wants to marry her but  he is appalled by her militancy; she wants to marry him but she won't to give up her independence to become a wife and mother. Guess who changes?

There's nothing you can fault in this book. The author has clearly done his research (it shows). He can turn a good phrase (see the selected quotes). It is carefully plotted (though it rather relies on coincidences) and well-paced. The main characters are nicely fleshed-out and believable. But it is all so predictable. I foresaw every twist. The characters are so stereotypical (feisty female, disapproving elder sister, battleaxe mother, naughty granddad). And it targeted only low-hanging fruit. Who now can argue against women having the franchise? Isn't it terrible to force-feed a hunger striker? Who isn't aware that the generals in the first world war were intransigent fools whose tactics caused huge numbers of needless deaths? I longed to be challenged by this book but I was soon aware that Quinn's popularity depends on him expressing sentiments that everyone else agrees with. He's a good enough writer to be controversial but, unlike his heroine, he copped out. I felt as Connie felt in chapter 4: "Disappointment touched its limp hand to her heart."

The Rt Revd Lord Harries, ex Bishop of Oxford, said in a Gresham College lecture in 2008 that what distinguishes literature from propaganda is that it can entice us to “enter into the minds of people with fundamentally opposed views or characters.” On that basis, this novel is propaganda.

Selected quotes:

• "It was the snailing tedium of the weeks in hospital that most excruciated her." (Prologue)
• "She detested picnics: essentially, one took a pile of sandwiches for a walk, settled oneself on a scratchy tartan rug, then waited for the wasps to show up." (Ch 1)
•  "How could so many consciousnesses be contained in one world, she wondered, each of them believing themselves to be the centre of the universe?" (Ch 7)
• "She sensed trackless swathes of dead time in prospect, like an Arctic explorer looking out upon a tundra and suddenly daunted by the isolation." (Ch 10)

July 2024; 483 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God