A Breath of Air

by Rumer Godden

“We are such stuff as dreams are made and our little life is rounded with a sleep,” cries Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—from which play Rumer Godden took the story of this novel, A Breath of Air. In cast of character and plot structure, parallels are certainly present—Mr. van Loomis is the novel’s magician and ruler; Charis, his literate, island-bound daughter, is Miranda; the playwright Valentine is Ferdinand; and the exiled, brutish Mario is Caliban. Yet the novel transcends its own source of inspiration by its poignant—at times even unsettling—development of such themes as the the limits of civilization, the need for liturgy, and the inexorable facticity of the natural order. A perceptive combination of myth and parable, A Breath of Air is a distinguished literary effort, evocative of the imaginative genius and luminous artistry synonymous with the storytelling of Rumer Godden.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Margaret Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947 and The River in 1951.
A few of her works were co-written with her elder sister, novelist Jon Godden, including Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India now part of Bangladesh.

Reviews

[Michiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a modern day retelling of The Tempest, and I think it dos quite a good job without being slavish. Chairs is the daughter of Mr. van Loomis, a Scottish lord who lost his estate to his brother and has bought a secluded island from a trading company. When a plane makes an emergency landing near the island, Charis meets European young men for the first time.

I love Rumer Godden, but she has a writing style that gets annoying if I read too much of her at a time. This book doesn't have her tics nearly so much. I love the points she was making about introducing "civilization" to cultures, and that there are no easy answers. This book made me think.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite authors. It is actually a re-telling of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" which I didn't know when I began because that is one of my least favorite tales from Shakespeare. I really enjoyed this one; made me think. I just might have to go back and revisit Shakespeare on this one now.

[Jim Puskas · Rating 3 out of 5]

There has long been a debate as to whether "The Tempest" is a comedy or a tragedy; it might be said that it is neither and both. Likewise, this novel that Rumer Godden penned, a re-telling of the same story—while omitting Shakespeare’s backstory of Prospero’s usurpation. Unlike his counterpart Ferdinand, Valentine is a playwright rather than a prince; and Van Loomis’s reasons for having fled his Scottish estates and made himself lord of this tropical island are never made clear. But no matter, the core of the story still works. And, as did Shakespeare, Godden eschews any moral, leaving her messages ambiguous. Whether the lovers will enjoy a good life, whether Van Loomis will really take up his former life, whether the island will lose its innocence and be overtaken by the ravages of commercial tourism—all of that, Godden leaves us to contemplate.
Shakespeare relied on magic for his play to function. Godden has to make do with Van Loomis being able to make it appear to the unsophisticated islanders that he can work magic. But even that still demands some suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader—most notably in Van Loomis’s trick of hiding an airplane. This is not the sort of trickery Godden normally indulges in, and I found that to be a weakness in the novel. She gets away with it only by, in effect, piggybacking on Shakespeare’s trickery; consequently, I suspect that readers unfamiliar with The Tempest might be less forgiving than I am.
In the end, I found that Godden’s characters in this novel came across as less immediate, less warmly human than in her other novels. Even the tropical setting, as charming as it is, somehow makes the story less real than, for example, A Fugue in Time or An Episode of Sparrows.
An engaging diversion, but far from being Rumer Godden’s best work.

[Jean Bowen]

A Breath of Air is a modern retelling of Shakespeare's Tempest. Filled with juxtaposition and tension the story unfolds: The sophisticated Play wright/ the Islanders, The Pagans/ the Christians, The Masculine father / The Feminine daughter, lovers/ The world.

Although this novel is not one of Godden's best (Greengage Summer is my favorite) her writing always makes me think. There were themes that I never really thought of while reading the Play that struck me anew in this fantastical retelling: The need for culture, its limits and fragility, Civilization [Liturgy] as a birthright.

“Awake, dear heart, awake. Thou hast slept well. Awake.”

[Lee Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story is a retelling of the Tempest, in the South Pacific. The wise man escapes to an earthly paradise and finds that human nature got there before him. It's a neat parable on the limits of benevolent dictatorship. The best laid plans indeed, or maybe “nothing gold can stay” would be better. The story itself isn't deep but it is vivid. It's more of an allegory than a novel Even in paradise, people struggle with life and how it should be lived. There is a lot to think about here. Van Loomis is the Prospero. He has freed the natives from the proverbial wicked witch and has greatly improved their lives by his rule. Yet his rule is still his rule. Ain't no election day in paradise. He is not a bad man but his refusal to allow the natives to confront the modern world is really just preserving them in an artificial childhood. The old ways are good but they have to be freely chosen. Filipino's desire to leave the island and embrace the modern world is a threat to the island's way of life. But even a choice with negative consequences is one he has the right to make. Making hard decisions is what Filipino, and every other adult human, has the right and even obligation to do. Maybe the natives don't like their quaint village. Maybe they would prefer indoor plumbing. The Caliban characters, McGinty and Mario, serve more as plot enablers than as villains. McGinty looks down on the natives as savages but how different is that from how Van Loomis sees them? Isn't a noble savage still a savage? Oh, yeah, there's a love story too. Well done and not sappy.

[Anne Lind · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always liked Rumor Godden's writing. This book was sitting on my shelf for some time and I finally picked it up. Good retelling of "The Tempest." Obviously set in 1950 and dated in some ways.

[Bookguide · Rating 3 out of 5]

My unedited notes taken while I was reading:

Title: “A soft wind blew from the sea, and a breath of air blew back, spiced, from the island to the sea, and the cotton tree, where the monkeys were, dropped its scarlet petals on the sand."

Book serendipity on the first page, i.e. links between books: there is a character called Charis, about whom I as yet know nothing, but I will be expecting an earth mother type with possible links to witchcraft. This is based on a therapist called Charis in Ali Smith’s The Accidental, read very recently indeed and another Charis in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.

“the sounds of that first sea morning beat softly on the air, sounds empty of life except for the sounds of birds and of waves. To Valentine it felt like the first morning of a new world. Was that because I had thought we should not see morning again? he thought. He was reluctant to speak or move; he felt he must begin to live and stir slowly, gently, as embryo life stirred, letting time uncoil itself.” (p.9)

Like most people, Valentine had a mental image of a desert island. “Flying fish went past them, sprinkling them with light drops and pocking the waves. The sun had grown stronger, and where they dipped their paddles the water broke into infinitesimal rainbows, small arcs and prisms of colour. The rainbows seemed significant to Valentine and he remembered that, no matter how stereotyped his islands had been, they were always magical to him. He lifted his head to look at the sweep of light sand along the margin of the bay, at the green above it and the hill with its white cloud, and in that moment he had from the island a sense of music, invisible music that crept by him on the water.” (p.12)

Valentine’s companion is the earthy McGinty. He is the first to use a racist term, assuming a big house must belong to a white man because of the well-kept garden. Valentine points out Adam in the Garden of Eden wasn’t white. In the sea they find two mail bags addressed to J. van Loomis.

His cook is called Serendipity. All the children born on the island after the Van Loomis family arrived with their servant Pheasant are named by her, based on the outside of Van Loomis’s books: Hutchinson, Resurrection, Golden Treasury.

Charis used to treat fictional characters from her books like her sisters. Nor Mario has changed that and spoilt her enjoyment of her limited life and the island for ever.

Mario’s mother was a Spanish woman, married to a minor island chief. “She had been a strange, coarse, cruel, wrathful woman who had ousted Niu’s father. As anyone who tried to oust someone was immediately killed, the fact they she survived marked her as a witch. Mr van Loomis Confined her to her house and stopped her spending time with the islanders, so when she died, Van Loomis was considered a magician.

He considered himself a benevolent master until the day everything changed. Firstly Charis is turning into a young woman and he realises something needs to change about the limbo they have lived in. For the first time she asks about her mother and he tells her his history. As the two white men appear around the headland, the young man Filipino refuses got the first time to do what he is asked. Unbeknownst to Mr van Loomis, Charis has taught him to read and write. Now he has read The Rights of Man and wants to claim his own rights. “It was not that he knew more than she—a good deal of what he knew was glib and parrot-like—it was his imagination and invention. The coffee pot was the least of the things he had imagined; at a spark he took flame. Charis had sometimes thought that he was so fierce he must burn himself out, but there was something inexhaustible in Filipino.” (p.45)

“Filipino alone had the sense of other islands, of the world, even of a magnitude of worlds. It was through books, but it was not only through books that he had it; he seemed to drink the air and know. At night, lying on his bed, in his open-sided hut, he would look up at the stars, and his significance would dwindle, and the island dwindled too and seemed to dissolve in the sound of its own surf into the air. This did not frighten him but gave him a strange melting joy as if he too had become the air, and then he often sang or wrote his songs. His eyes were not phenomenal to Filipino; he was a phenomenon himself, one of those who went from idea to idea as if they walked on the tips of mountains, if they walked at all. They did not have to learn to fly: they had to learn to walk.” (p.47)

The Caliban-substitute Mario, whose mother had been the despotic ruler before Van Loomis arrived, is a sullen, slow-witted, clumsy young man who had tried to assault Charis and has now been exiled to an offshore rock with a lighthouse.

“He is like a great bullock, the way he moves his head from side to side when he is worried, thought Mr van Loomis. Mario was worried now. He wished that Mr van Loomis and the boatman would not come and look on his shame. The heavy mat of curls on his forehead made him look more like a bullock than ever, but it did not hide the dumb unhappiness of his eyes. “I am unhappy, unhappy,” Mario would have said, but he could not say it; he did not know how to, he could only feel it. He was sent away from the island where he had grown up, where people were tolerant of him; away from the drink that lifted him up into another Mario who was braver and more articulate, even if he were sick next day. Now he was penned here with himself. […] This Adam loneliness was worst for Mario, as it was best for Filipino who needed to be solitary. Mario needed people; he was gross and lustful; grossness and lust thrive on people.” (pp.58-59)

Godden remarks that Filipino knew that England had primroses, but he didn’t know what they were. Likewise, in Annie John by Jamaica Kinkaid, the Jamaican schoolgirls were taught Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils, but could not imagine them.

Pondering on religion, Charis “thought how the spark came out of the tinder on the dry wood and made a fire… and no one knows what will be wood to what tinder, or what fire they light, she said to herself . There is magic in that; but I shan’t light any fire, said Charis. She was too cool, and she thought of Filipino, how if he walked on the shore he would kick the stones, pick up shells and throw them away, with a perpetual inner restlessness, sit down on a rock, dreaming, gazing, with his thought flowing in and out like the waves, like the tide. Filipino, sitting on the rock, had fire in him; he smouldered. She was cool, but it seemed to Charis that there was this to be said for her: she saw magic where nobody else did. “Isn’t it magic, this that is in people, that deep fire?” asked Charis. “The rest is conjuring,” she might have said. Her father had told her he had given up conjuring, but he had said that we all conjure a little. Because we must, said Charis, her eyes on the sea, unless we have enough magic. She saw this clearly in Filipino: that he would have to choose between conjuring and his own original magic.”

Mr van Loomis triumphantly tells the two men from the outside world that the island is completely self-sufficient, with no telegraph or supply ship or delivery of petrol; there are no machines to need it. In a wonderful adventure scene, he takes the steps necessary to hide the aeroplane from would-be rescuers or the men themselves. He intends for them to stay long enough for Valentine and Charis to fall in love, the solution to the problem of finding a suitable suitor for her.

However earthy and grumpy McGinty is, I was rather astounded when he hears that the plane has gone and says “He couldn’t have burned her; we should have seen the smoke and there would have been shit all over the water.” He doesn’t consider the islanders as people at first and describes the girls as the derogatory ’bints’.

Charis declares her love for Valentine: “I want to say it plainly and then I shall never say it again; I will be anything, do anything, go anywhere, if I can be near you.” His response? “I love you”, but he also thinks “Charis would be good with his mother, defend him from her without letting her know he was defended. Charis would answer the telephone, and he thought of the cool calmness she had already; it would not be easy to get past Charis on the telephone.” How romantic; he just wants her to be his secretary! A husband, too, but I am slightly sad for her.

Her father also realises that, happy as he might be at their marriage, he will lose his daughter. “That is all the thanks I get. […] To be a parent is a thankless task! After all these years I am thrown on one side. He will be her mentor, her companion, her first love.“

Once he decides he must leave the island in charge of its original inhabitants, Mr van Loomis gives an impassioned speech to Niu and Filipino, telling them of the dangers of opening up the island to the outside world as Filipino dreams of doing.

Valentine is a playwright, famous enough for Charis to have read about him in old newspapers, when his star was high. Famous enough for his friend McGinty to believe that he only has to signal SOS VAL SOS VAL to make rescuers realise who is stranded in the island. After Valentine has had long enough to rest and readjust on the island, he becomes despondent because his last play was a flop and he realises the one he is supposed to be in London to stage has no heart. The life force he experiences on the island brings him back to life and he is struck by an irresistible urge to write. I wonder if this reflects Rumer Godden’s own experience as an author. “Perhaps I am heartless, but it [inspiration] always comes at the most inconvenient times; it always will. […] He wrote while he should have slept.” He forgot to eat, even when Van Loomis comes to speak to him, he cannot listen but notices things he wants to edit and becomes absorbed again.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was decent. I really thought it was going to end differently but it wasn’t bad.

[Moonkiszt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rumer Godden's lean toward Shakespeare's The Tempest. . .and I was persuaded. All the usual suspects were in play - Prospero (Mr. van Loomis), Miranda (Charis), Caliban (Mario & McGinty), Ariel (Filipino), Ferdinand (Valentine Doubleday). . .

Mr. van Loomis takes his massive fortune and isolates himself and his daughter (mother has died in the long past years) and builds a self-sustaining paradise island whose native population is turned to his own purposes. He pays them and 'betters' them through grooming them for white acceptance - manners, Western education (as if they needed that). He allows no one to come or go except those in his thrall to gather what little bits of the outside world are required to fulfill their needs on the island.

And then one day . . .a plane crashes and the world changes. . .

Rumer's books always fill my head spaces with her luscious atmospheres imbued with sounds and smells, saturated color and warm tropical air. This one with its island setting has lulled me away. . .its floatier, less cohesive than others she has written but I've enjoyed the float. . .have sent my copy of the book up to Juneau to warm my Shakespeare loving sister. . .

25|52:13k

[Candy Wood]

The copyright page on this 1951 Viking edition has a note that the novel first appeared in serial form in Ladies’ Home Journal, and I wonder how it went over with magazine readers. The epigraph is from Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Godden adds that she has “taken the story of the book” from the play. As with any adaptation of Shakespeare, the fascination is in the differences. The Prospero character is a 20th-century Scottish earl who doesn’t blame his brother for taking over the estates and businesses he was too bored to run, and he voluntarily brought his daughter to the island (precisely located in the Indian Pacific), which he bought. The Ferdinand is Valentine Doubleday, a successful London playwright and pilot, whose plane comes down near the island--his copilot McGinty stands in for Shakespeare’s Stephano and Trinculo but is much more practical, immediately working on ways to get home. Newspapers do get through, so that Miranda-Charis knows who Valentine is. This island already has more inhabitants than Prospero’s, including the brutish, half-Spanish Mario and an islander twin named Filipino who gets his desire to be free partly from reading Thomas Paine. Comments about the music of the island, Mr. van Loomis’s youthful fascination with magic, Valentine’s work with the logging crew, and even a chess game between Valentine and Charis keep reminding readers of the source, but the magic of the play is entirely missing. Godden implies that the modern world, with its “shimmering maze of American advertisements, than which nothing can more subtly fill the mind,” drives out magic. But in comparison with the play, the novel doesn’t work.

[Lady Jane]

I was disappointed. I have enjoyed reading Rumer Godden before, but this retelling of Shakespeare's Tempest was filled with an overt racism that I found disturbing. Of course books that are disturbing are also thought-provoking and I have certainly been thinking about this book a lot, but I do not think this was Godden's intention. It is perhaps a good reminder of just how different the modern world is compared with the world of 1950, when A Breath of Air was first published. In future, I will return to Shakespeare--his island is more pure, more symbolic and more open to interpretation.