The Gulls Fly Inland

by Sylvia Thompson

It is October 1939. Blanche Lancret is a French exile in England, looking after her friend Annabelle’s baby. She is waiting for news of Annabelle’s brother Vernon, who is fighting the enemy in France, and of her surrogate mother Tante Julie, a rich démi-mondaine who refuses to leave Paris. To maintain her sang-froid Blanche writes her journal, reflecting on the story of her love for Vernon while she lived with Tante Julie in Paris. His American wealth does not make him correct enough for Tante Julie’s servants, who ensure that Blanche and Vernon will not meet. Now Vernon is caught in marriage to the impervious Bostonian Leonora and Blanche realises how they have been kept apart. As the years wind forward Blanche and Vernon are caught tight in other people’s machinations, and only the war might set him free. Sylvia Thompson’s glorious, passionate novel of the Second World War is a sumptuous romance set in the imperturbable correctness of demi-monde Paris, and in fast-moving 1930s London and Boston. Blanche negotiates the intrigue of others and stifles her passion with a stoic sadness. Thompson’s storytelling is austerely correct and devastating in its emotional truth. A wonderful forgotten novel from 1941, now reissued with an introduction by Faye Hammill, Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow.

Genres: World War II

194 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Sylvia Thompson was a novelist, writer and public speaker.

She attended Somerville College, Oxford like her mother. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville College included Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Hilda Reid and Margaret Kennedy. She established her reputation as a public orator, and in 1932, she joined the lecture circuit in the United States.

She married in 1926 & had three daughters.

Sylvia Thompson Luling died on 27 April 1968, aged 65, at Reigate Heath, Surrey, England.

Abridged from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Tania · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sylvia Thompson’s novel proved a disappointing read for me, for three reasons. The first of these was because of the expectations that drew me to read it in the first place. The subtitle and the back-cover blurb led me to believe that I would be reading a novel that took place around the fall of France, which is more of an event that happens around the characters rather than something that they experience themselves. Instead, the focus is more on the years leading up to it, which are recounted as extended flashbacks through the journal entries of her protagonist, Blanche Lancret. Thompson’s reliance on this approach for the structure of her book was especially annoying, as it left me feeling we were constantly waiting to get to the actual events of the story.

This sense of annoyance was exacerbated by the one-dimensional nature of her characters, nearly all of them appear in the entries as little more than names of figures with whom Blanche interacts. One of the few exceptions is the main antagonist, Leonara, who is defined mainly through Blanche’s comments about her demeanor. The others – even the love interest, Vernon – are so indistinguishable that I routinely went back a few pages to try and remember who they were supposed to be. As a consequence, the story proved disappointingly flat, with the characters listlessly going through the motions of living rather than having any life themselves. Perhaps this is what Thompson intended, yet any deeper meaning is absent from its pages. It all felt like a sodden mess, and one that failed to justify the book’s reprinting.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5 Stars)

First published in 1941 in the midst of WW2, The Gulls Fly Inland is an evocative, elegiac novel by the English writer Sylvia Thompson. A prolific author in her day, Thompson has an interesting background, having studied at Oxford’s Somerville College alongside other literary luminaries such as Margaret Kennedy, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. As Faye Hammill notes in her excellent introduction to this book, Thompson caused quite a stir at Oxford with her striking clothes, audacious wit and vibrant personality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these qualities made their way into The Gulls Fly Inland, Thompson’s eloquent novel of a cosmopolitan life and a longstanding, star-crossed romance.

The novel, which opens in October 1939, is narrated by Blanche Lancret, an unmarried Frenchwoman in her mid-thirties. As Blanche awaits news of her American lover, Vernon, she takes refuge in the South of England, where she cares for her baby goddaughter, Camilla Blanche. To occupy her mind, Blanche looks back on her life, recording key events and relationships in a journal, stretching back to her cultured childhood in France and Italy, her schooldays in England and subsequent travels to America, courtesy of her close friend Annabelle, Camilla Blanche’s mother.

Following her mother’s death from pneumonia in 1908, Blanche is raised by her father, a history professor at the Sorbonne, and Tante Julie, her mother’s half-sister. Tante Julie, a hugely influential figure in Blanche’s life, makes quite an impression with her auburn hair, striking clothes and deep, distinctive voice.

Her green Breton eyes looked down on my clothes, especially my shoes, with an appraising expression, guessing their price. But when she smiled her eyes twinkled green between the beads of mascara. She always gave off a delicious fragrance, or rather aroma, especially when she was moving to and fro in her suite of over-crowded little salons, dusting ornaments with her handkerchief, and smoking, and talking in her deep voice… (p. 4)

Holidays at her father’s villa in Italy are more relaxed affairs for Blanche, especially as rigid structures and routines are jettisoned in favour of a more laissez faire-approach to life. Here, as in the novel’s many Paris-based scenes, Thompson demonstrates her skills in portraying settings in a vivid, evocative way. The novel contains some beautiful descriptive writing, painterly in style with a gimlet eye for detail.

We breakfasted separately when we had woken and rung a bell for Mario to bring coffee. We lunched in the cool shadows of the hall, where mythological frescoes, pink and yellow and grey-blue-coloured in some places, crumbled to blankness in others, had the quality of half-remembered dreams. (p. 15)

In her teenage years, Blanche attends boarding school in England, and it is here that her friendship with Annabelle Strudwick, a fellow pupil at the school, deepens. There is perhaps something of Thompson herself in the beautiful, sophisticated Annabelle, with her luxurious possessions and decadent habit of spaying herself with perfume before bed, which she justifies as getting ‘into practice for a lover’. Nevertheless, it is Annabelle’s brother, Vernon, who captures Blanche’s heart. The pair first meet in England, where Vernon has also been studying, then later in Boston when Blanche visits the Strudwicks at their grand home.

At first, Blanche and Vernon seem destined for one another, but the presence of another admirer of Vernon’s, fellow American Leonora, casts a shadow over their fledgling romance. A role in his family’s business brings Vernon to Paris, where he reconnects with Blanche; nevertheless, the selfish actions of Tante Julie’s servant, Balthasar, leave Vernon with the district impression that Blanche’s affections lie elsewhere. This is, of course, untrue, and there are hints of Balthasar having form when it comes to thwarting desire…

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[Paula Leal de matos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A love story that describes well the atmosphere leading to war and the aftermath of the fall of France. Easy to read by non-native English speakers.

[Laurean · Rating 5 out of 5]

A vintage contemporary republished book. This is a beautiful book full of sumptuous details of a past world. I will read more of Sylvia Thompson.