The Amazing Interlude: A Wartime Romance With a Stage-Set Frame
Mary Roberts Rinehart follows a sheltered young woman who runs a blockade into the war zone and comes home changed, if unevenly told.
This is a romance built around a woman's single departure from an ordinary life. Sara Lee Kennedy leaves a settled, expected future behind, crosses into a country at war, and runs a small house of mercy near the front. The book is on the History shelf, and the war it describes is a recent one for its author: Belgian trenches, star shells, aeroplanes with a black cross on each wing, secret-service men crossing inundated ground by night. But it is not a war chronicle. It is the story of what the war did to one person, and of the man she meets there.
The frame, and what it promises
Rinehart opens with an extended theatrical conceit. Life is a stage with a fixed back drop; most of us never see it change; then, for a few, the lights go down and the solid wall turns transparent. Sara Lee, we are told, becomes a fairy of a sort and meets the prince. The chapter closes on a plain statement of what the book is after.
This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory—and of something more.
I
That single sentence tells you the shape of the whole thing. The interlude is bounded; it will end; and the point is the residue it leaves behind. Readers who want the war itself at the centre will find the frame keeps pulling back to a private, domestic scale.
What it is actually like to read
The prose is unhurried and often good on small physical fact. Sara Lee soaks the chill out of her body in a cold room with no soap and learns, from that, to carry soap everywhere afterwards. These practical details do more to convince than the grander passages. When Rinehart turns to the machinery of espionage she narrates it almost as an essay, opening a chapter with a flat authorial address rather than a scene.
Much has been said of the work of spies—said and written.
XIII
This is the book's habit and its unevenness: it will step out of the story to explain a thing, then step back in. Some readers will like the confiding, storyteller's voice. Others will feel the momentum leak out whenever the narrator lectures.
Who it rewards, who it will bore
The emotional core is a triangle: Henri, the soldier she meets abroad, and Harvey, the solid man waiting at home. Rinehart is honest about how uneven that contest is inside Sara Lee. On the train home she cannot even summon Harvey's face, only a photograph, while the other man arrives unbidden and complete.
It was strange how Henri's face haunted her.
That is the book working at its best, plain about a feeling the heroine would rather not have. Against it sits a good deal that dates the book: the fairyland framing, the sheltered-girl-abroad premise, the readiness to tell you how to feel.
- Rewarding for readers who enjoy character-led wartime romance and don't mind a narrator who addresses them directly
- Rewarding for anyone curious about how a popular author of the period rendered the early war from a civilian, aid-worker angle
- Likely to bore readers wanting sustained battle narrative or a fast plot, since the tension is emotional and the pace deliberate
- Frustrating if the stage-and-fairy framing reads to you as quaint rather than charming
Read it for the texture of a woman's short, transforming absence from her own life, and for the quiet accuracy of its detail. Read past the framing, not for it.
The book, free to read
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