Young Blood by E. W. Hornung
Mar. 11th, 2019 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeWith Raffles Week underway, my Hornung read-through has reached the final pre-Raffleite work.
Young Blood (1898) follows the life of the poetically-named Harry Ringrose, who returns from his travels in Africa to his family home in the north of England, only to find the house deserted, his father's business in ruins and his father vanished into thin air while his mother is reduced to genteel poverty in London. The rest of the book chronicles Harry's efforts to find work to support himself and his mother, his growing career as a writer and his attempts to unravel the mystery of what happened to his father, all overshadowed by the apparently benevolent yet suspicious presence of Gordon Lowndes, a friend of old Mr Ringrose.
Much of the basic shape of the plot appears to have been inspired by Hornung's own life, although I doubt the original involved quite so many dramatic twists and contrived coincidences. Both Hornung and Harry are the sons of northern industrialists, spend time as young men travelling in the colonies, return to find the family business in reduced circumstances, and end up finding success in London as writers, drawing on their experiences in foreign lands to inspire their stories. From this angle some of the things this book has to say about writing are pretty interesting: Harry laments that the public and publishers aren't interested in honest accounts of his experiences in Africa, and he has more success with comic poems and takes some time to establish a real presence writing about things he wants to write about. After reading through Hornung's early works I'm very interested to know how much of this was based on the author's own experiences!
Harry's economic troubles were interesting from another angle as well. He begins in London by looking for work as an office clerk, and the situation he describes—hundreds of applicants for far too few posts, interview after demoralising interview with men who might have something to suit him and all ultimately decide that he won't do, the way his expensive and prestigious education leaves him at once overqualified and lacking in the skills he'd actually need to do this sort of work and losing out to more experienced candidates—felt eerily familiar. The more I read about urban life in 1890s Britain, the more surprised I am by—for all that there have been massive changes in many ways—how little so many things have changed. Nothing new under the sun, indeed...
But the best thing about this book was, as ever, the moral ambiguity, and especially that surrounding the character of Gordon Lowndes. He is introduced with an aura of definite suspicion and goes on to do various definitely unscrupulous things (threatening and abusing his creditors, pawning Harry's possessions behind his back, planning a dodgy get-rick-quick scheme based on exploiting Highland crofters, etc.—he's far more unglamorously unpleasant than Raffles!), but at the end of the characteristic twisting and turning he emerges as, if not actually good, then certainly on the side of good. He's contrasted with a much more straightforwardly good character, Mr Innes—Harry's old schoolteacher who he has a crush on—and the comparison is definitely in Innes's favour, but the narrative doesn't only condemn Lowndes, and he certainly does a lot to help Harry and Mrs Ringrose, apparently out of genuine good feeling. I was never convinced (I couldn't get over the Scottish crofters thing—too unpleasantly banal-evil), but he is certainly an intriguing character.
Next week is The Amateur Cracksman at last, after which I will be taking a break from the read-through for a bit—I've been reading a book a week for the last month or so for it and am building up too much of a backlog of other things I want to read—but I think it's gone pretty well so far!
Young Blood (1898) follows the life of the poetically-named Harry Ringrose, who returns from his travels in Africa to his family home in the north of England, only to find the house deserted, his father's business in ruins and his father vanished into thin air while his mother is reduced to genteel poverty in London. The rest of the book chronicles Harry's efforts to find work to support himself and his mother, his growing career as a writer and his attempts to unravel the mystery of what happened to his father, all overshadowed by the apparently benevolent yet suspicious presence of Gordon Lowndes, a friend of old Mr Ringrose.
Much of the basic shape of the plot appears to have been inspired by Hornung's own life, although I doubt the original involved quite so many dramatic twists and contrived coincidences. Both Hornung and Harry are the sons of northern industrialists, spend time as young men travelling in the colonies, return to find the family business in reduced circumstances, and end up finding success in London as writers, drawing on their experiences in foreign lands to inspire their stories. From this angle some of the things this book has to say about writing are pretty interesting: Harry laments that the public and publishers aren't interested in honest accounts of his experiences in Africa, and he has more success with comic poems and takes some time to establish a real presence writing about things he wants to write about. After reading through Hornung's early works I'm very interested to know how much of this was based on the author's own experiences!
Harry's economic troubles were interesting from another angle as well. He begins in London by looking for work as an office clerk, and the situation he describes—hundreds of applicants for far too few posts, interview after demoralising interview with men who might have something to suit him and all ultimately decide that he won't do, the way his expensive and prestigious education leaves him at once overqualified and lacking in the skills he'd actually need to do this sort of work and losing out to more experienced candidates—felt eerily familiar. The more I read about urban life in 1890s Britain, the more surprised I am by—for all that there have been massive changes in many ways—how little so many things have changed. Nothing new under the sun, indeed...
But the best thing about this book was, as ever, the moral ambiguity, and especially that surrounding the character of Gordon Lowndes. He is introduced with an aura of definite suspicion and goes on to do various definitely unscrupulous things (threatening and abusing his creditors, pawning Harry's possessions behind his back, planning a dodgy get-rick-quick scheme based on exploiting Highland crofters, etc.—he's far more unglamorously unpleasant than Raffles!), but at the end of the characteristic twisting and turning he emerges as, if not actually good, then certainly on the side of good. He's contrasted with a much more straightforwardly good character, Mr Innes—Harry's old schoolteacher who he has a crush on—and the comparison is definitely in Innes's favour, but the narrative doesn't only condemn Lowndes, and he certainly does a lot to help Harry and Mrs Ringrose, apparently out of genuine good feeling. I was never convinced (I couldn't get over the Scottish crofters thing—too unpleasantly banal-evil), but he is certainly an intriguing character.
Next week is The Amateur Cracksman at last, after which I will be taking a break from the read-through for a bit—I've been reading a book a week for the last month or so for it and am building up too much of a backlog of other things I want to read—but I think it's gone pretty well so far!
