White Crow

by Storm Jameson

Bloomsbury Reader will publish great books which are currently unavailable in print where all English-lanugage rights have already been reverted to the author or the author's estate and where no edition is currently in print.

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2011

About the author

Margaret Storm Jameson was an English writer, known for her 45 novels, and criticism.

Jameson studied at the University of Leeds, later moving to London, where in 1914 she earned an MA from King's College London. She was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She married writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson.

From 1939, Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, and active in helping refugee writers. She wrote three volumes of autobiography.

A well-received biography, by Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways this novel, published in 1968, seems to exist in a world where Joyce and his attendant followers had never existed. It is "traditional", in that it is in many ways a novel steeped in the ideas of the form prior to 1922. There is nothing inherently wrong with that - a good story is a good story, good prose is good prose, and interesting characters remains so however they are conjured up.

Storm is a very talented writer, and I am yet to read anything of hers that was not a pleasure from start to finish (though I am aware she wrote much for money, in order to live, and there is probably a great deal of "average" out there from her). I enjoyed this a great deal, found it moving at times. Certainly I would wholeheartedly recommend reading it, particularly as many very cheap copies are floating around.

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KIRKUS REVIEW (from 1969)

Like the bird of the title, the main character is a distinct physical oddity if not quite a freak. He was born in the 1890's in Portugal the night his housemaid mother died in the room next to an elderly English boarder. John Antigua was born with teeth, hair, a pendulous nose, a singularly shapeless, thick torso and two strips of scaly flesh along his shoulderblades. Rather than abandon the baby to the near-certainty of death in a Portuguese orphanage, the Englishman took him home to his elderly spinster sister who wasted no time in turning the boy out when her brother died fifteen years later. From day school student of promise to scullery boy in the kitchen of a wealthy London household which would have unsettled the wits of any other boy, Antigua from babyhood on still displayed a supra-human sweetness of temper and at this point began drawing on a strange inner resource--a pre-sleep dream that persisted until his death in an air raid during World War II . The dream involved a medieval monastery setting complete in every detail and from these dreams, Antigua would emerge fully rested after very few hours of sleep. Tremendous energy and real ability moved him from scullery boy to assistant chef, from there to master chef in his own gourmet restaurant where he began, as early as World War I, to begin recognizing the people of his dreams among his clientele and acquaintances. Despite a marriage of convenience, the lonely baby who had evolved by himself into a thoroughly self-contained man, Antigua never had a human contact as real as his conversations at midnight with God and a Viennese Jew who had been murdered by the Nazis. . . . The fantasy element is all the stronger here for its placement in a sturdy rags-to-riches formulation--a deftly different story from an audience-tested author.

[Lucienne Boyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways I found this book a difficult read. I didn’t particularly warm to the main character, John Antigua, though he is certainly a fascinating study, and the circumstances of his life are remarkable. It’s a very thoughtful book, but a lot of the thought is expressed in rather forced, brittle, dinner-table conversations. On the other hand, Storm Jameson is always an interesting writer, and what did impress me was her attempt to confront the existence of evil, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust.