Finish What You Started: Riddle of the Sands

Some months ago, as part of my "Finish What You Started" project, I decided to finish reading The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers.

I had stalled on this book about three chapters from the end, and thought that was just a bit stupid. So I sat down one weekend and finished it.

I bought this book last year whilst on vacation in Estonia. I had just finished something exceptionally light and trashy, and thought I'd go for a "genre classic". Riddle of the Sands was one of those books I knew by title alone. Well, I knew it was a spy book - espionage of some sort - which is a genre I don't usually read. I had a fling with James Bond a couple of years ago (hasn't everybody), but after reading three or four of Fleming's books (slightly out of sequence) I stalled about two chapters into Live and Let Die and never got back to the series.

Live and Let Die would be included in the "Finish What you Started" project, but I can't find it. I lost the book when I moved house, and I just can't be bothered borrowing it from a library when I have so many books in my house I haven't finished.

Anyway, I knew Riddle was a "classic" spy book and I knew it had something to do with sand. For some reason, I had imagined that to involve deserts and the foreign legion, or something. Not so much. It's actually about a couple of guys mucking about in boats off the coast of Germany at the turn of the 20th Century. A lot of the book involves a government desk-jockey discovering the joys of yachting in amongst the sand-banks of the Frisian Islands. Oh, and we think there may be a plot to invade England, but it could just be a salvage company trying to find treasure.

I have to admit that the reason I stalled so close to the end was because the book is actually kind of boring. On the one hand, you do get a real sense of what it must be like to be on a little, ramshackle boat piloted through the sand banks by a boating savant, but on the other hand nothing much happens. We slowly gather hints, which slowly turn into ideas, which slowly suggest action which slowly unfolds. I never felt any real tension or danger in the whole thing. Plot "twists" were rather predictable. The only real surprise was that there was no surprise. For some reason I was expecting something unexpected to happen in the end.

I quite enjoyed bits of the book on-and-off, and I was impressed with the verisimility of the book - the boating scenes seemed entirely real, and the simplicity of the plot lent it believability. However, I think it says something about a book if you can stop reading it three-chapters from the end and not really feel as if you're missing out on anything.