Cover of the first edition, 1924.
Book review by Mary G: Ever since I was a young teenager I have had a horror of the Hulks, decommissioned ships which were used as prisons during the Napoleonic Wars. I had gradually attached the horrific experiences associated with these floating death camps with Great Expectations. The crucible of Magwitch’s fearsome appearance and ferocity has been the hulk off the Kent marshes, from which he has escaped. But of course Dickens does not enter that terrifying space directly; he leaves us to imagine the brutalising effect of such an environment. Magwitch’s generosity is an expression of the humanity which such treatment attempts to extinguish.
I picked up “Mr Rowl” to read for our exploration of D K Broster because the title recalled the tidy line of Broster novels in the shelves of my boarding school, all associated with romance and I remembered “Mr Rowl” as being the most romantic. What I had forgotten was that the most memorable passage of this exciting thriller and romance, was not a scene of courtship or even escape from imprisonment, but the description of the hell of the hero’s incarceration in a hulk.
Raoul des Sablières stood in the lower battery of the Ganges gazing, with a sick horror, through an atmosphere in which he could scarcely breathe, at its half-starved and half-naked population. The battery was only about thirty feet by forty; it was so low that a tall man could not stand upright, and the only liht and air came from a dozen or so small ports about eighteen inches square. In this space, furnished only with a bench running round it and four in the middle were penned between three and four hundred beings in various stages of misery, disease, and degradation – his future companions . . . . And as he stood there half stupefied with the clamour, watching the throng of evil faces, some of which, no doubt, had, when their owners first entered this place, been as unbranded as his own, Raoul felt as a drowning man may feel whose fingers can no longer grp the spar which has kept him afloat.
The exact measurements of that impossibly small and suffocating space was my first image of systematic human cruelty. It is a dimension quite beyond the romances of Georgette Heyer which were soon to succeed Broster in my affections and to which I obsessively returned in my teenage years. Though I read all Broster’s novels I did not return to them. I think the romance within them is perfectly pitched for a young teenager with only the vaguest idea of what romance might mean. In the two I have reread, “Mr Rowl” and The Flight of the Heron, courtship and the thrill of potential loss or misunderstanding are only lightly sketched. The two romantic relationships are established fairly early in on the novels: in The Flight of the Heron before the novel starts and in “Mr Rowl” in the first few chapters. The narrative questions in both are not ‘Will this beautiful couple get together’ but ‘Will the hero survive and will he survive with honour?’.
The hero in each case is an enemy of the English. The focus is on his fate, not the heroine’s. His ability to maintain his dignity is especially interesting because in both novels the hero is ‘the enemy’ of the English, the novel’s readership. The appeal of such a figure is quite unlike the lure of the Scarlet Pimpernel for example who epitomises the supposed attraction of a certain kind of Englishness, an aristocrat so deeply assured of his virility and intelligence that he can pose as a woman and a buffoon. Both of Broster’s heroes are Catholic and both are enemies of the English. The humanity and dignity of the foreigner are what each book is about.
Both heroes are lent authority by their command of French culture. I think that was part of the romantic allure to a girl at boarding school who was exploring all the different cultural worlds contained within the modest school library. Both heroes, Mr Rowl and Ewan, earn the respect of their English enemies in part because of their cultural sophistication, because of their non-Englishness. They make the English seem limited by comparison. In fact, the misspelling of the French name Raoul as ROWL flags up the ignorance of Mr Rowl’s gaolers.
Mr Rowl is a French prisoner-of-war in a small town in England during the Napoleonic Wars. As he is an officer, he in entitled to parole so is invited to the houses of some of the local gentry. The question of whether he is worth such trust is the mainspring of the plot. The question is finally resolved at the end of the book when it is revealed that the Frenchman behaved magnanimously to wounded British soldiers at the battle of Salamanca in the Peninsula wars. This revelation enables him to marry an English woman with due honor.
The book opens with the aural image of the Frenchman’s tenor voice floating seductively out of the window of an English manor house. He is singing an early seventeenth century English song, ‘Since First I Saw Your Face’. The response of the prisoner’s human host is appreciative. Another visitor’s less so: ‘What right has a French prisoner to be singing English songs?’ He growled. ‘If he must sing at all, let him keep to his own jargon’. The beautiful Juliana is beguiled but already engaged so the mutual attraction of English woman and French prisoner is honorably checked by both.
The cultural authority of the singer (he can sing songs from different musical traditions) and the sexual allure of the voice, provoke the jealousy of Juliana’s dastardly fiancé, an Englishman who, in possession of a title and the biggest estate in the district, is shown to be bankrupt morally and narrow in his sympathies. Jealous of the glamorous Raoul he conspires to have his parole removed. Raoul is shipped to a prison where he helps some prisoners escape. He is caught and assumed, mistakenly, of trying to escape himself. He therefore forgoes all the privileges of an officer and is sent to the terrible hulks. He escapes with the help of Juliana who by then has realised what a villain her English fiancé is. Raoul makes his way through the English countryside dressed as a woman and is befriended by a benign English naval man and eventually reunited with his lover.
Curiously the most erotic moment of this popular romantic novel is charged with homo-eroticism and entirely voyeuristic. Raoul, exhausted by his escape and half in and half out of his female disguise is lying on a bed in the house of his final rescuer, the English naval captain. The captain’s equally benign middle-aged sister peers into the bedroom and her gaze dwells appreciatively on the beauty of the sleeper whom she gradually discovers to be a desirable man. This is a book full of surprises but they are not generated by a conventional romance plot.
