Book Review: FORTITUDE By Hugh Walpole. **** out of *****

Reading Hugh Walpole is a strange and wonderful thing. Sometimes he's brilliant (The Prelude to Adventure), sometimes he's good (Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill), and sometimes he's barely passable (Jeremy). Fortitude (1913), Walpole's homage to the works and styles of Dickens and Henry James, is nearer to brilliant on that spectrum.

It follows the life of one Peter Westcott, from his boyhood to the onset of middle-age, tracking his attempt at transcending a hard life, including a disturbed, abusive father, poverty, and, ultimately, succeeding as an author. The plot is layered, sprawling, even meandering at times, but Walpole is at his most ebullient here, driving vigorously onwards through a breakneck narrative, pulling the reader with him.

I guess it would be considered sacrilege to call Fortitude as good, or even better than, a lot of Dickens' coming of age tales, but Walpole comes close. He also attempts to mimic James' psychological mastery, but here, he doesn't really succeed, although his characters are interesting enough, some even fascinating. The protagonist, Peter Westcott is a flawed character if ever there was one, and in the hands of a lesser, and less humane, writer, he would have been thoroughly unlikable, but Walpole makes him not only compelling, but sympathetic as well.

Aside from the sheer storytelling joy of Fortitude, with its twists, turns, and occasional forays into hackneyed melodrama, Walpole is aiming for something more, something higher. Like in this exchange between Westcott, after the successful publication of his first novel, and Henry Galleon, arguably a thinly disguised surrogate for Walpole's idol, Henry James. Galleon says to  the young author: "Against all these temptations, against these voices of the World and the Flesh, against the glory of power and the swinging hammer of success, you, sitting quietly in your room, must remember that a great charge has been given you, that you are here for one thing and one thing only ... to listen..." The whole of Galleon's speech, is sublime, in fact; and sublime is what Walpole, in his own flawed way, achieves with this novel.

Fortitude is unputdownable, moving, sensational, unabashedly melodramatic, somber, and, in the most surprising of ways, uplifting. A great book that deserves to be rescued from the shadows of obscurity.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2021.

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Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of several short films and a feature, which was released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon. Find him on Twitter @AFKhalifa and on Facebook @Dark.Fantastic.AK·Writer