William Cook rereads The Riddle of the Sands, "the first spy novel"
The Riddle of the Sands, which next year celebrates its centenary, not only pioneered a brand new literary genre, it foresaw the First World War - and possibly even helped to start it. What's more, the cloak-and-dagger life story of its author, Erskine Childers, was just as thrilling as his fiction. Born in London, raised in Ireland and educated at Trinity College Cambridge, Childers left his desk job as a clerk in the House of Commons to fight for king and country in the Boer war. Wounded and decorated, he returned home to write his first and only novel. It was an instant bestseller - and a century later, it is still easy to see why.
The Riddle of the Sands is about two young Englishmen sailing around Germany's eerie East Frisian Islands, who uncover a Prussian plot to invade England. But although Childers's proto-thriller is rooted in the Anglo-German paranoia of the Edwardian era, his cool, understated style feels far closer to the laconic cold war prose of Frederick Forsyth or John Le Carre. His Englishmen are a plausible blend of incompetence and adventure (Carruthers is shrewd spy, but a hopeless sailor; Davies is a naive sleuth, but a brave and brilliant yachtsman) and even his German characters are proper portraits, rather than monocled, moustache-twirling stereotypes. However, his leading player is neither a German nor an Englishman, but the mysterious Teutonic seascape - an elusive maze of shifting sandbanks that gives the book its title.
Childers sailed this enigmatic shoreline many times in his twenties - and, like every good writer, he writes best about what he knows. Carruthers, his narrator, generally adopts the no-nonsense tone of a seasoned war reporter, but although his biographical sketches are despatched with brisk journalistic economy, the pictures he paints of this treacherous coast ("the dull hard sky, the wind moaning in the rigging as though crying in despair for a prey that had escaped it") have a memorable, lyrical intensity.
The Riddle of the Sands can be read as an eyewitness report of contemporary espionage, but also as an account of one of the most pivotal epochs in modern European history. Ever since routing France, in 1870, Germany had been the greatest military power on the Continent, but as long as Britannia was left to rule the waves, an uneasy peace prevailed - King Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm II were near relations, after all. That delicate detente was shattered by Wilhelm's craving for a great navy, to befit Germany's new status as a world power. The resultant naval arms race was the main cause of the breakdown in Anglo-German diplomacy, and provides the main theme of the book. "Those Admiralty chaps want waking up," declares Davies. "We're a maritime nation. We've grown by the sea and live by it. If we lose command of it we starve." And Germany acquires an empire.
Yet, despite its alarmist intent, The Riddle of the Sands is not remotely anti-German. "I don't blame them," says Davies. "We can't talk about conquest and grabbing. We've collared a fine share of the world, and they've every right to be jealous." Even that wartime bogeyman, the Kaiser, is an object of admiration rather than loathing. "He's a fine fellow, that emperor," says Davies. "We want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn't want to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country." But Davies still believes that war is "bound to come". Such fatalism, far more than German battleships, was what really brought about the First World War.
In the war that he had predicted, Childers was decorated again, and served in the fledgling RAF. But, by now, he was preoccupied with a different conflict - the struggle for Irish home rule. On the eve of war, in a real-life sequel to his bestseller, he sailed his yacht to smuggle German guns to Ireland. After the war, he joined Sinn Fein, was elected to the Dail and became minister for publicity. However, he opposed the treaty that gave Ireland limited dominion status and, in the civil war that followed, became director of publicity for the Irish Republican Army. Arrested by the forces of the Irish Free State (bizarrely, for possessing a revolver, given to him by Michael Collins, first prime minister of the free state, who had recently been assassinated by Irish republicans), he was court-martialled and shot.
"Take a step forward, lads," he said, after shaking hands with every member of the firing squad. "It will be easier that way." Fifty-one years later, his eldest son was elected president of Ireland.
Childers's eclectic life and work confirm what many Anglo-Irishmen have always felt: that it is perfectly possible to love both England and Ireland, as many Anglo-Irishmen still do. And although in Ireland he is remembered mainly as a pioneering nationalist politician, in England he will always be best known as the father of the English spy story. "I die loving England," he wrote to his wife, the night before his execution. Childers gave his life for Ireland, but he bequeathed to his beloved England a near-perfect prototype for one of the most prolific English literary genres of the 20th century.
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