One of the best things about starting this blog has been the conversations that arise in response to posts – people asking questions and sharing insights on Mary Stewart’s writing. Recently, emails have been speeding to and fro between myself and Annabel Frazer. Annabel is the author of The Day the Earth Caught Cold (see here for the novel’s amazon page), and she is really knowledgeable on Mary Stewart. Click here for Annabel’s Goodreads page. She has written a review of Mary Stewart’s 1991 novel, Stormy Petrel, here:
“Stormy Petrel is one of only two Mary Stewart romantic thrillers set in Scotland – given that she lived in Scotland for so much of her life it’s odd that there aren’t more. And it has to be said that in my view Stormy Petrel does not compare well with its predecessor, Wildfire At Midnight.
As always, the book begins with a young woman embarking, whether she knows it or not, on an adventure. Rose Fenemore is a Cambridge don who needs time to write and decides to go and stay on a remote Scottish island. I must admit that I struggle to warm to the idea of a heroine who is a teacher (see also Charity Selborne and Camilla Haven) and I can’t help feeling it’s a little annoyingly smug of Rose to be at Cambridge, no less. (Yet I don’t mind Gianetta Brooke being a supermodel in Wildfire – double standards?)
At any rate, the setting, as always with a Mary Stewart, is beautifully evoked. A distant Scottish isle with mists and sands and half-ruined cottages, it feels remote and bleak – but also a little cosy, it has to be said. There’s something reminiscent of a children’s story in the cosy interactions of the island community.
Mystery is slow in unfolding on the island of Moila – and rather small-scale when it comes. If you enjoy reading about pathological killers and war criminals and international wreckers who do it for kicks, you may find yourself short-changed by a gentle plot in which there is no sizeable peril and motives and identities are not unclear for long. By the time two of Rose’s hearty female students arrived on the island, the whole thing began to feel like an Enid Blyton adventure and I was relieved to get to the end – a disappointing and thankfully rare experience with Mary Stewart.”
What do you think – does this chime with your reading of Stormy Petrel? Some readers are disappointed by Mary Stewart’s later suspense novels, and I would agree that the writing has changed in tone: do not expect the wild rollercoaster ride of suspense and sensation of the early novels. I know that the first time I read this book, it wrong-footed my expectations utterly, so much so that I had to read it over again. I like this book and feel that I want to defend its good qualities to Annabel – but to do so properly, I will need to re-read it and I’m not sure when that will happen. In the meantime does anyone else want to write about how good – or bad – they found this book? Please get in touch with your thoughts.
Allison, I am a fan of Mary Stewart and have read nearly all of her books, but this was one of the books that didn’t pull me in.
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Thanks for getting in touch! It is certainly very different from the early suspense novels. But it can’t just be me that loves this book…?
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Hi there ! I don’t normally do this but I had to comment and tell you how much I adore your blog! I just came across it now and I am so happy I have, it is so wonderful and you truly have a great blog. I am going to follow you so I can keep up to date with all of your latest posts. Keep up the great work!
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Hi, thanks so much for your lovely comments, I’m glad you like my blog. I’m now following your blog too!
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Aww you are so welcome! You have a wonderful blog. Do you have Twitter or Instagram? I just made accounts and would love to follow you! Aww and thank you!
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Thank you! No, I don’t have instagram. And my twitter is really unconnected to this blog, it includes rants, political bias etc, so I can’t in all honesty recommend it to you or my other lovely blog readers!
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Haha no problem at all! (:
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It’s been some time since I read it. I agree that it isn’t as suspenseful as her earlier books but I don’t recall being disappointed. I was just thrilled to have a new Mary Stewart to read. I’d be happy with one of her shopping lists.
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Hi Cryssa,
I think you have hit the nail on the head here, as well as making me laugh! Mary Stewart, for me, can start with any material and make it amazing: I’m quite sure she could write a suspenseful and memorable shopping list!
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I love this book (to be fair, I love all of the Mary Stewart books) – it is a gentler plot, but sometimes that’s what I feel like reading.
I’d love to visit Moila, for the wildlife especially. Reading (and re-reading) it makes me remember visiting Lord Howe Island – it’s a completely different part of the world and a very different landscape, but there are a lot of birds there; I feel as though Crispin would love it 🙂
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Hi Laura, thanks for your comment! I’m fairly sure you can visit ‘Moila’ – I seem to remember reading somewhere that Moila is based pretty strongly on Mull, a favourite Scottish island of Mary and Fred Stewart.
Lord Howe Island is a new place-name for me, it sounds lovely, I’ve run out of time for now but after work I will be googling where it is and what it looks like.
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Hi Allison, I’m guessing Lord Howe doesn’t look anything like Mull/Moila – it’s the remnant of an extinct volcano with subtropical rainforests and coral reefs, off the east coast of Australia. The link for me is all the birds I saw when I visited it a few years ago 🙂
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Sounds fascinating, I shall definitely be taking a peek online 🙂
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I’m glad no one condemned my verdict outright! By chance, I was on Mull when I was reading Stormy Petrel. In the book, it is the large island from which you reach Moila, which is clearly much smaller, with only a handful of cottages. So a model for it might be Iona, or perhaps Staffa.
Annabel
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Hi Annabel,
No condemnation at all – you are honest and fair. How thrilling that you read Stormy Petrel in the Hebrides! Thanks for the information about Moila, good to know it is not as I (mis)remembered it, a ‘Mull-in-disguise’. I have had a look at the transcript of the ‘Off the Page’ Jenny Brown interview of Mary Stewart that has now disappeared from Youtube. It has the following:
“JB: ‘What sparked off your most recent novel The Stormy Petrel?’
‘… again it was the setting. I thought, we’ve, my husband and I have been out to the islands, we go to Mull quite a lot which is lovely and I thought, well I’ll try a setting out, I’ll invent an island, which I did. And also I think, partly one’s getting this very strong feeling of wanting our natural heritage to be protected and left alone in fact. Birds, animals, scenery'”
Thinking about all this is making me even more desperate to re-read Stormy Petrel…
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Fun to read these thoughts. I read Stormy Petrel a long time ago, when it came out, and I do remember feeling it was less suspenseful and compelling than her earlier books. It felt more mellow… As a biographer, I always think about the time of life of people, and certainly Mary Stewart was getting older by this time, and perhaps happy to just create a lovely spot for us to dwell in via our imaginations? Her childhood in a small village was perhaps also being recreated for her own pleasure?
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I think those are really good points as to why this book feels more mellow than books she wrote when she was younger. I agree she may have been looking back over her own life: not a major stretch from Mary Stewart’s ambition to be an Oxford Professor of Poetry to Rose Fenemore’s occupation and writing.
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It’s interesting to think about inventing an island. I tried to do that once, for a novel that didn’t go anywhere in the end. It was much more difficult than I thought to think up the topography and keep it consistent. But Mary Stewart is brilliant at settings and manages to keep quite complicated topography like the mountains of Crete and Skye clear in her head. (I always have to check the map in Wildfire At Midnight to keep track of where all the characters are.) City settings are easier because you mostly only have to worry about two dimensions, and if it’s a real one like Paris or London, you can just rely on the AZ!
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Thanks, Annabel, it is fascinating to get a writer’s point of view, this is something I hadn’t even thought of! I’m sure I would find it impossible – unless, perhaps, it was strongly based on an existing, real setting that I knew very well.
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