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Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A marriage of inconvenience: The Bride Stone, by Sally Gardner, reviewed
It's 1796, and an idealistic young English doctor, Duval Harlington, just released from La Force prison in revolutionary Paris, learns that his father is dead. He is now Lord Harlington, heir to a fortune and the idyllic estate of Muchmore. But in order to gain possession of his heritage – and, as importantly, foil the aspirations of his unpleasant cousin Ralph Carson – Duval must marry within two days and seven hours. No suitable partner is available, so he buys a woman in a Norfolk wife sale for ten guineas. Money, its acquisition and loss, is woven through this hugely enjoyable novel. The French refugees trying to make their way in Georgian England are very different to those in The Scarlet Pimpernel, and one character is saved from death in a freezing, damp, broken-down cottage only by the liberal application of lucre. Duval's country estate is not valued simply as a birthright, but because 'in prison, the memory of Muchmore's tranquillity had kept him alive… an oasis from the outside world'. What is described is the kind of healing, enchanted space all damaged people dream of, and tend to find only in fiction. It is not only Duval who needs healing. His new wife, Edmée, is French, the widow of a brutish, drunken parson; and once her bruised face has healed, she turns out to be a woman of refinement, beauty and mystery. The gentlemanly Duval expects to be able to give them both their freedom after the wedding ceremony, but there is a codicil to his father's will: within a year, the new Lord and Lady Harlington must be in love. The wicked Carson will stop at nothing to prevent this happening, and when Duval and Edmée do indeed become lovers, she promptly vanishes. Our hero must go in pursuit of his wife, discovering both her secrets and that of a priceless jewel lost in the Terror. All this is fun, but what lifts The Bride Stone above the level of pure entertainment is the author's engagement with her characters. Duval left home 'as a young man, with a head full of dreams' and returned 'ancient, with a head full of nightmares'. Edmée has suffered rape and torture; she is seriously ill after Duval buys her, and it transpires that this was not the first time she had been sold or abused. The novel owes as much to the fury at injustice of A Tale of Two Cities as it does to Georgette Heyer's These Old Shades. A Carnegie and Costa-winning author of children's fiction such as I, Coriander, The Red Necklace and Maggot Moon, Sally Gardner is one of those rare authors, like Joan Aiken and Eva Ibbotson, who can write equally well for adults and children. The tropes of the genre are infused with wit, imagination and maturity. Where her previous adult novels, such as The Weather Woman, needed better editing and less magic, The Bride Stone is leaner and more propulsive. Each chapter is short and absorbing, much like a first-rate children's novel but with indirect intimations of sex. The book abounds with vivid minor characters, from the detective (or Bow Street officer) Mr Quinn searching for Edmée to Duval's wise, motherly aunt and the viciously snobbish Carson. We all crave escapism at present, and it is surely no coincidence that the two best entertainments this summer – Laura Shepherd-Robinson's The Art of a Lie being the other – are both set in the turbulent 18th century. Just be warned. I stayed up very late to finish this book.
Irish Examiner
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Culture That Made Me: RTÉ broadcaster Áine Lawlor picks her touchstones
Born in 1961, Áine Lawlor grew up in Coolock, Co Dublin. In 1984, she joined RTÉ as a continuity announcer, going on to work as a reporter and presenter on several radio and television programmes, including The Week in Politics on TV. She joined the Morning Ireland radio presenting team in 1995. She narrated Mary Raftery's landmark documentary series States of Fear, which was broadcast in 1999. She co-presents Morning Ireland, Monday to Friday, 7am-9am. The Scarlet Pimpernel Growing up, I was a voracious reader. My grandfather had a book stall, so there were always books in my grandmother's house. I remember the Scarlet Pimpernel books; they were incredibly racy and exciting. They're about this English Aristo who is off rescuing people from the French Revolution in Paris, and there's this horrible French spy who's trying to catch him the whole time. There's a rhyme about him: 'They seek him here, they seek him there/Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven, or is he in hell? That damned, elusive Pimpernel.' Jane Austen From my childhood books, Jane Austen is the go-back-to author. She has a kind but wicked eye for human foibles. Nobody's perfect in an Austen novel. It was such a difficult world for women to navigate, which she captures perfectly. Even Mrs. Bennett – if she'd only had a son her life would have been different. She's seen as a foolish creature, but no wonder – if you were facing destitution, you'd be desperate to marry off those daughters; as a younger reader, you don't read that into her character, but as you get older, you can see all these different ways. My favourite Austen novel is Persuasion. It's about disappointment, a very ordinary story in a way, and in another it's beautiful. The Godfather The best movie of all time is clearly The Godfather trilogy. I love the epic scale, the acting, the colour. It's like opera – it's got so many levels, and it hits the high notes so often. Al Pacino in the Godfather (1972). I love Al Pacino's eyes during the gun scene, when he has the gun hidden in the toilet or the Judas kiss for Fredo, the betrayal, or Pacino's eyes when saying goodbye to Diane Keaton's character when she comes back to see her son. Gabriel García Márquez I loved reading all the Gabriel García Márquez books. The Autumn of the Patriarch is my favourite. It's magic realism like One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it's much shorter. You need to be on holiday and have time to spend with it. It's a beautiful allergy on love and life, and how short life is. Pat Barker I love Pat Barker, not only her Regeneration trilogy. I loved her Greek mythology trilogy, the Women of the Troy series. It's rewriting history from the point of view of those Greek myths. It's a retelling and a re-understanding of a story that's universal, but in her telling we're able to reinterpret it through a woman's lens. That part of the story isn't in the original Greek myth. When looked at from the women's point of view whose daughters are being sacrificed, of course they plot their revenge. Say Nothing A book I've recommended to loads of people is Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, the New Yorker writer. It's a fascinating story. Given my job, it's difficult to say what I'd want to say about it, but what I would say is I never met Dolours Price. She's a fascinating and complex figure, and having read it, I wish I had met her. Hamilton My daughters started me going to musicals. They made sure I saw Hamilton, which was unbelievable. You end up crying your eyes out over the American Constitution. Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton. It's something that sounds like an old, dry political story, but through a modern lens and using modern forms of music and dance, they turn it into something that touches young people, old people and makes them all cry and laugh. It's fantastic. The Wire I loved The Wire. It told such a huge, epic story. I also read David Simon's books it's based on. In one book, he spent time with criminals and with cops in the other book. It's the scale of it, looking at the drugs problem from everyone's point of view. Also, neither solution gave you good outcomes, neither the criminal crackdown nor the zero tolerance, and keeping it to a specific area. I loved Bubbles, your man who pushed the buggy. Reality TV My secret vice is reality TV when I want to decompress. I like, say, The Valley. It's about a group of young people with young kids, living in the valley – if you can't afford to live in Beverly Hills, you live in The Valley – who squabble all the time. Another show is Below Deck. It's set on this yacht. Famous or rich people come and hire the boat. It's mostly about the crew, how they're getting on, who's not working, who's fancying who, and all their misadventures. Olivia O'Leary Olivia O'Leary is the best interviewer in my time. She had the smarts, the coolness, and the accuracy – the ability to make a question accurate. So, no matter how hard the person is trying to obfuscate, they must give you something like a fact or a truth in the answer. Olivia O'Leary. She understood all the nonsense and how to get past it and get at the fact and construct a question that will get the person to address that fact or has the best chance. She could cut through the waffle. The Settlers Louis Theroux's documentary The Settlers is excellent. It's about the settler movement [in the occupied West Bank]. He shows you a reality that's not normally captured. His style is very open, but it was clear even he was shocked at what he saw or was disturbed by it. It's a very disturbing documentary. Druid O'Casey The Druid Theatre Company trilogy in the Abbey last year of Sean O'Casey's plays about the Irish revolutionary years – The Plough and the Stars; Juno and the Paycock; and Shadow of a Gunman – was stunning. To think those plays were written within a couple of years of the Rising, and the commentary is as modern, critical, radical and shocking then as today. I can't imagine the impact of it back then. When something is good, it's still fresh a hundred years later. Seeing the three of them together was hard work on your bum, but worth it. David Hockney A book I'm waiting for my holidays to read is A History of Pictures by David Hockney and Martin Gayford. I was at the Hockney exhibition in Paris recently at the Foundation Louis Vuitton, which runs until the end of August. I can't tell you how brilliant it is. It's huge. It covers his whole career. It has everything – you've all the famous stuff from earlier on, but his later work – which he did during Covid – is mind-blowing. He got this new youthfulness, this new explosion. You walk out of there happy, just from the colour. It's gorgeous. Read More The story of Barry Lyndon: 50 years since Stanley Kubrick made his epic in Ireland
