- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Fourth Estate; New edition edition (16 July 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1857027647
- ISBN-13: 978-1857027648
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 12.7 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,450,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Patrimony
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A compelling and accomplished first novel which follows the progress of a young film maker haunted by the subject of her first film, a little known 1st World War poet, Valentine Siddons.
After her film researcher mysteriously disappears taking all his research with him, Elsa Meyers is obliged to research the film herself. The subject of this film is a 1st World War poet who was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Aided by the poet’s grandson, also his biographer, she discovers that Valentine Siddons may not be the hero she has been led to believe. Her professional partnership with his grandson, Dr Oliver Eastway, leads to romantic involvement and a professional conflict of loyalties. Should Valentine Siddons: A Life be more accurately titled Valentine Siddons: A Lie?
Jane Thynne combines two compulsive parallel stories, skilfully weaving past and present, fact and fiction, and builds to a dramatic conclusion.
About the Author
Jane Thynne read English at St Anne’s, Oxford, and was a finalist in the Vogue talent contest. She wrote headlines for Tatler before becoming a production trainee at the BBC where she worked as a producer/director in several departments before joining the Sunday Times as a feature writer. In 1988 she became the Telegraph’s media correspondent. She is a frequent guest on Start the Week and has made many appearances on TV as a paper reviewer. She is married to the novelist Philip Kerr (Gridiron)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is an intelligent novel that successfully combines elements of literary mystery (akin to Possession rather than the Da Vinci Code) together with parallel stories of the first world war and contemporary London.
Valentine Siddons is one of the first world war poets (an imaginary figure combining elements of Wilfred Owen, Sassoon, Graves et al.) who died a hero's death in 1917 rescuing a comrade in no-man's land. Elsa Myers is researching a film of his life, and starts an affair with his grandson, an academic who is writing a biography of Siddons. She discovers what she thinks are early but unknown poems of his and seeks to fit them into what is known about his life, little knowing that they will lead her to a very different story from the one she expects.
Interspersed with Elsa's story are snippets of her lover's biography, which introduce a 3rd person narrative of various episodes from Valentine's real life: his time at Oxford, the publication of his first poetry, his introduction into London literary society and the Bloomsbury group; his love affair with Constance Emberley and his time in the trenches.
This sounds complicated but actually Thynne pulls it off confidently, and allows the layers of narrative and various versions of the `truth' to themselves become part of the story she is telling. Personally I found the 1914-7 part of the story marginally more compelling than the contemporary one which was a little too obvious in some ways, but both are important to the book. With the glut of fairly recent books set in the same period, this somehow manages to remain fresh, perhaps because it spends time in London amongst the pacifist and literary crowd; but the warfare scenes are also powerful without becoming too repetitive or derivative.
The one weakness is that Elsa, supposedly a literature graduate from Oxford, cannot see that the `early' Siddons poems she finds, and which we get to read, are actually immature and just fairly bad poetry - while the story tells us that this just wasn't the case with his war poetry (which we don't get to read). But that's a small blip, which doesn't spoil the overall feel. Dramatic, emotionally reticent rather than overblown, this is a compelling and sometimes moving novel.
Valentine Siddons is one of the first world war poets (an imaginary figure combining elements of Wilfred Owen, Sassoon, Graves et al.) who died a hero's death in 1917 rescuing a comrade in no-man's land. Elsa Myers is researching a film of his life, and starts an affair with his grandson, an academic who is writing a biography of Siddons. She discovers what she thinks are early but unknown poems of his and seeks to fit them into what is known about his life, little knowing that they will lead her to a very different story from the one she expects.
Interspersed with Elsa's story are snippets of her lover's biography, which introduce a 3rd person narrative of various episodes from Valentine's real life: his time at Oxford, the publication of his first poetry, his introduction into London literary society and the Bloomsbury group; his love affair with Constance Emberley and his time in the trenches.
This sounds complicated but actually Thynne pulls it off confidently, and allows the layers of narrative and various versions of the `truth' to themselves become part of the story she is telling. Personally I found the 1914-7 part of the story marginally more compelling than the contemporary one which was a little too obvious in some ways, but both are important to the book. With the glut of fairly recent books set in the same period, this somehow manages to remain fresh, perhaps because it spends time in London amongst the pacifist and literary crowd; but the warfare scenes are also powerful without becoming too repetitive or derivative.
The one weakness is that Elsa, supposedly a literature graduate from Oxford, cannot see that the `early' Siddons poems she finds, and which we get to read, are actually immature and just fairly bad poetry - while the story tells us that this just wasn't the case with his war poetry (which we don't get to read). But that's a small blip, which doesn't spoil the overall feel. Dramatic, emotionally reticent rather than overblown, this is a compelling and sometimes moving novel.
Format:Paperback
With scenes moving between late twentieth-century London and the trenches of the First World War, Patrimony is a love story, a tale of war, and a meditation on the different ways in which people betray others and themselves. At its heart is the mystery that surrounds the fate of the fictional poet Valentine Siddons, supposedly a war hero. There is literary detective-work (after the fashion of AS Byatt's Possession), academic skulduggery (the suppression of vital evidence, as in Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night), passion (past and present), and a caustic look at the preoccupations of the modern media.
Many novels have been written about the First World War, but Thynne's account still has the capacity to surprise. She vividly evokes the very different responses to war that co-existed at the time, sometimes within the same individual. And, without wishing to give away the ending, it is not what one might expect. Those who have read Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong may be expecting the poet's affair with a married but childless aristocrat to prove fruitful, but Thynne avoids any such trite conclusion. Those who take the (perhaps unfashionable) view that history is not merely a matter of relative interpretations, but involves certain truths that can be uncovered by careful research, will undoubtedly be satisfied by the ending.
Many novels have been written about the First World War, but Thynne's account still has the capacity to surprise. She vividly evokes the very different responses to war that co-existed at the time, sometimes within the same individual. And, without wishing to give away the ending, it is not what one might expect. Those who have read Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong may be expecting the poet's affair with a married but childless aristocrat to prove fruitful, but Thynne avoids any such trite conclusion. Those who take the (perhaps unfashionable) view that history is not merely a matter of relative interpretations, but involves certain truths that can be uncovered by careful research, will undoubtedly be satisfied by the ending.
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