Jennifer Silver goes to the Pyrenees in France to see her widowed cousin Gillian, who has written to her and asked her to visit. Jennifer runs into Stephen at the hotel; a man from her past who was warned off her by her mother. A veteran of the Korean war he was a music student of her father’s but was already 21 when Jenny met him at 17 or so and after years of training has headed off to Vienna for a two year course. He’s now 26 and decided that Jenny is the girl for him, but has never said anything to her. Professor Silver just sidestepped his wife and gave Stephen the address of Jenny’s hotel in Gavarnie.In a nod to Radcliffe’s Gothic romance (who is name dropped) her cousin is staying in a local convent. Cue the organ chords. Dun dun dun… The creepiness is made real when a nun tells Jennifer that her cousin is dead. She died two weeks ago from injuries sustained in a car crash. But Jennifer is doubtful; even in periods of lucidity her cousin didn’t mention family or speak English and she was English. She also told a young girl that blue flowers were her favorites when Gillian has an unusual blue/yellow colorblindness.Something about the demeanor of this nun makes her doubtful. She demands to see the mother superior and finds out that the dark and reticent Spaniard Dona Francisca, is not a nun, but she does hold the purse-strings; she’s the bursar. When Jennifer sees what she thinks is an El Greco plus other religious items of real gold and ivory in the children’s chapel, she wonders what is going on and why things of such obvious value are in the tiny convent. But the Mother Superior is blind and cannot say what ‘Gillian’ looked like but she does seem to know what the Dona is like and constantly refuses her request to take orders to become a nun.Jennifer insists that her cousin is still alive but where can she be? And why hasn’t she tried to contact Jenny?******I have to say, it is a rare book that starts with geology on the first page. I have a geo degree and I knew exactly what the ladies were discussing at lunch. Bwahaha. I read that Stewart’s husband was a geologist and lectured at Durham university so perhaps she had one too many odd discussions at the breakfast table, too.Perfect quote:“Mother and daughter got on very well indeed, with a deep affection founded on almost complete misunderstanding.”This is an early Stewart novel and Jennifer spends a lot of time wailing and waiting to be rescued by Stephen but then again, she is much younger than some other Stewart characters, too.There is also a bit of old-fashioned comparisons of less educated men as brutes, or primitives; perhaps a thing of its time. Mid 1950’s? If they are young and beautiful that is fine, old and hairy not so much. So Jenny is not as self reliant as later Stewart heroines. She faints when a brute kisses her, for example.Couple of plot holes: (view spoiler)[ What exactly is her cousin doing offering lifts to the sister of bank robbers? How on earth is Gillian going to feel if she remembers that Pierre Bussac treated her as ‘his wife’ for some weeks? (hide spoiler)]
Earlier this year, when Hodder reissued Mary Stewart’s novels in striking new covers, I remembered that I have always meant to try her books. My mother used to love them, and I can remember her bringing them home from the library back in the days when I was still borrowing from the junior shelves.Now that I have read Thunder on the Right I can understand why all those books came home.I met Jennifer, the twenty-two year old daughter of a distinguised Oxford Professor, at a hotel high in the Pyrenees. She had come to visit Gillian, her widowed cousin, who had written to her, quite unexpectedly, from a nearby convent.Jennifer was unsettled when she met Stephen, a man she had known back in Oxford. They had been very close. But Stephen had been a student of her father, and the professor thought him an unsuitable match for his daughter and forced them apart.And she is was disturbed, and distressed, when she visited the convent and wasis told that Gillian has died, and has been buried. That she left nothing, not a single word for her family. Jennifer knew that to be completely out of character. And she saw other signs that something was amiss, and that maybe, just maybe, the woman who died wasn’t Gillian.Jennifer seeks Stephen’s help in uncovering the truth …Thunder on the Right offered so much.A heroine who was beautiful, charming, bright, and engaging. A hero who was heroic, but was also reassuringly mortal. A wonderfully drawn supporting cast. A richly evoked setting.And, to hold all of those things together, a cleverly constructed plot, that mixed intrigue, action and romance to wonderful effect. All of the elements came together perfectly. I was swept away, and I lived through every high and low, such an extraordinary range of emotions.Thunder on the Right was a fine piece of storytelling, and a marvellous entertainment.Some might find it a little old-fashioned, a little contrived even, but I didn’t mind any of that. I was caught up in the story, and I wanted to believe.And now I could happily turn back to the beginning and live through the story all over again. I won’t, because so many other books are calling, but I will pick up another of Mary Stewart’s books very, very soon.
What do You think about Thunder On The Right (2004)?
Read a few reviews of Thunder on the Right on Goodreads before starting it and, retrospectively, two stand out in particular. One was by a woman who claimed that she found it a bargain basement version of Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus. The other stated that she could not put it down – not because she found it so gripping, but because she feared that after abandoning it, even to make a cup of tea, she would find returning to it impossible.I feel for both of these readers, since my response to it was so similar. Even by the escapist standards of Mary Stewart, this was a load of melodramatic tosh with altogether too many fainting women and rare medical conditions that could be used to identify characters. I have since discovered that this was Stewart's least favourite novel and she considered it her weakest – not without cause either, I might add.Two stars is rather generous, but it does have a sort of mad energy that keeps the reader turning the pages, even as their inner critic begs them to stop.
—KJ
Jennifer Silver, a young British woman, travels to the French Pyrenees in search of her cousin, Gillian, who suddenly wrote that she was entering a French convent. Waiting for Jennifer in the beautiful French town of Gavarnie . . . . . . is Stephen, who's been carrying a torch for Jennifer for years, though she's been--until now--totally oblivious to that fact.Jennifer is told by Doña Francesca, the bursar at the convent, that a week or so ago Gillian was in a car crash and died at the convent a few days later. But Doña Francesca (boo!hiss) clearly has a sinister agenda, and there are reasons to think that the woman who died at the convent was not Gillian . . .Re-reading this after 20 years or more, I reluctantly have to say that the years haven't treated this Mary Stewart book as kindly as most of her other mystery/romances. There are flashes of Stewart's brilliant writing, but they're encased in a lot of what Stewart herself called purple prose. The weather is repeatedly used as a heavy-handed symbol, heroine faints, hero fights, villains menace and leer. The writing and the plot are both on the overwrought side. Stewart shows a lamentable tendency to overuse ellipses in this book, which reminds way too much me of Barbara Cartland's breathless heroines.If you're a Mary Stewart completist or an avid fan of old-time Gothic-type romantic suspense novels with fainting heroines, you may enjoy this, but if you're new to Stewart's books, do yourself a big favor and don't start with TotR.This is a very weak 3 stars, more like 2 1/2. Chalk it up to sophomore slump; I understand this was Stewart's second novel. She didn't care for it much either. This was a buddy read with the Mary Stewart group, and while we were debating whether "thunder on the right" is a quote from another source, a few of us came up with our own poems using the title phrase. I'll leave you with my (very) late-night offering (warning: mildly spoilerish):The Lament of Doña Francesca"The time has come," the bursar said,"To talk of many things:Of gold ... and blackmail ... and smugglers,Of a cousin and the trouble she brings ...Of Celeste's crush on that stupid boyAnd just how much that stings ....And why the thunder is on the rightAnd whether my black robe has wings." More astoundingly bad great mediocre TotR poetry can be found at https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
—Tadiana ✩ Night Owl☽
This is the most dreadful trash. But it's perfect to read on a lazy holiday, or when you are ill in bed. Gothic romance, purple prose, naive, feeble but beautiful heroine, strong but sensitive hero, sinister villainess, predictable ending -- it has everything. Set in and around an isolated convent in the Pyrenees in the 1950s, it rather reminded me of a downmarket version of Black NarcissusUsually Mary Stewart's strength is the way she conveys a sense of place. But this seemed too overblown and over-written most of the time:A shower of hail raced up the slope and over the crested woods, its million tiny ghost-feet pattering and galloping overhead like a wave sweeping the shingle. As it ebbed into silence the lighting stabbed again: a flash, a crack, and then at one stride the storm was in the valley; the growl and roar of thunder rolled and re-echoed from the mountains on either hand, and the sword of the lightning stabbed down, and stabbed again, as if searching through the depths of the cringing woods for whatever sheltered there.There are pages and pages like this -- she must have been getting paid by the word. It's hard to believe this is the same person who wrote the excellent Merlin trilogy.
—Veronica
