The Voyage

by Charles Morgan

Set in the Charente country and the Paris music halls of the 1930s, The Voyage tells of the travails of one mans finest work is that rare thing: a novel with appeal across ages and tastes. It is at once romance and adventure, a hymn to France.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

508 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1940

About the author

Charles Langbridge Morgan was a playwright and novelist of English and Welsh parentage. The main themes of his work were, as he himself put it, "Art, Love, and Death", and the relation between them. Themes of individual novels range from the paradoxes of freedom (The Voyage, The River Line), through passionate love seen from within (Portrait in a Mirror) and without (A Breeze of Morning), to the conflict of good and evil (The Judge's Story) and the enchanted boundary of death (Sparkenbroke).

Morgan was educated at the Naval Colleges of Osborne and Dartmouth and served as a midshipman in the China Fleet until 1913. On the outbreak of war he was sent with Churchill's Naval Division to the defence of Antwerp. He was interned in Holland which provided the setting for his best-selling novel The Fountain.

He married the Welsh novelist Hilda Vaughan in 1923.

He was the drama critic of The Times from the 1920s until 1938, and contributed weekly articles on the London theatre to the New York Times. His first play, The Flashing Stream (1938), had successful runs in London and Paris but was not well received in New York. The River Line (1952) was originally written as a novel in 1949 and concerned the activities of escaped British prisoners of war in France.

He was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 1936, a promotion in 1945, and was elected a member of the Institut de France in 1949. From 1953 he was the president of International PEN.

While Morgan enjoyed an immense reputation during his lifetime and was awarded the 1940 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, he was sometimes criticised for excessive seriousness, and for some time rather neglected; he once claimed that the "sense of humour by which we are ruled avoids emotion and vision and grandeur of spirit as a weevil avoids the sun. It has banished tragedy from our theatre, eloquence from our debates, glory from our years of peace, splendour from our wars..." The character Gerard Challis in Stella Gibbons's Westwood is thought to be a caricature of him.

Reviews

[James Lever · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a hardback version I picked up from a secondhand bookshop. Although not a modern book, it's written in a style that's both easy on the eye and also draws the reader into the plot very successfully. Essentially a romance where Morgan applies the 'singleness of mind' that he promotes in his play "The Flashing Stream" but here in more covert manner. The story is set in France in the 1930's. I first read this book when I was a teenager and now, much older, it was good to re-read this. The length of time it's taken to finish it does not detract from its readability - I've been reading half a dozen books alongside it, constructing a website and also writing my own books.
If I can find a copy of "The Gunroom" and it's not too expensive, I'd like to read that.

[Tansy Hawksley · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books; I return to this story time and again. The language and pace may be off-putting to the modern reader; I first read it in the late 1980s before the internet destroyed our attention spans, so the book is not dead to me. It's a beautiful (and unsentimental) love story: acceptance between equals and opposites, with a very modern acknowledgement that not all love relationships fall into the traditional mould (marriage, cohabitation, etc). It's a great story of career-building (her) and living at peace with your own personal morality (him). For both of them, the journey they take is about becoming the best person they can be. Some fabulous plot twists and I'll never hear 'Clair de Lune' in the same way again. It is also, apparently, the story of a love affair with France and indeed the countryside and the city of Paris are so vibrantly written, they are two characters in the novel. And, finally, the characters are so beautifully drawn. I can see them and feel their atmosphere. Not sure I have ever come across as present a hero and heroine in a novel.

[Kalle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and frustrating. Arguably another book where very little of action happens, but it still kept me engaged. I suppose it eventually was a love story

With my extremely limited knowledge of French, this book was and is a bit hard to get into. For the longest time, I had trouble remembering character names and separating them from names of places. It was like going into a fantasy novel, except without the fantastical elements. Also, there is a certain intermedial gap that I could not quite cross: whereas the French used in, say, Anna Karenina, was used for effect and as a language that the aristocrats spoke in, it feels weird to read an English novel set in France, written in English, yet with some French passages that are not 'translated'.

Oh, and surprise, the titular voyage is more of a metaphor, there are no large ships in this book.

[Tiago Ramos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is currently my favorite fiction book. Charles Morgan is a terrific author who should be better known.

[Rebecca]

Macmillan 1950 hardback, signed by Mum 1958.