Description

[from back of dust jacket]

All marriage is an intrusion of sorts. Into some lives it seeps quietly like a sea-mist. Ford Atherton found more kick in the kind that crashes down like an avalanche.

When the beautiful, gifted and wealthy Bryda Malone, with her own reasons for this desperate step, proposed marriage to a young workman out of an aircraft factory, she little knew what avalanche she had set in motion.

This is the story of how it crashed; though fortunately. The date is early in this War. The setting shifts from Bryda's home in the Midlands to a picturesque village on the Welsh Coast.

Notes

I'm normally a big fan of Berta Ruck's war novels but Intruder Marriage, honestly, isn't that great. The "becoming a better person" trope works best when the character is at least somewhat sympathetic or relatable to begin with and you then watch their growth over the course of the novel. Bryda is hard to like -- she's snobby, selfish, privileged, and pretty unethical, and it takes a very long time, like, 28 chapters, for her to be shocked (by a literal bombshell), into taking stock and changing her ways. It's not too little -- she does a 180 -- but it's just too late for a really enjoyable read.

That's not to say there isn't some good stuff in with the frustrating, though. The best part, in my opinion, is the male lead's reassignment to a balloon unit on the Welsh coast. Not only does Berta's love for her native Wales shine through in her descriptions of land, the town, the homes, and the people, but I ended up being intrigued and learning something about the pretty fascinating history of balloon warfare. I'd initially assumed this was a meteorological station -- that they were weather balloons -- but, in fact, they would have been barrage balloons festooned with steel cables and intended to protect ground targets from dive bombers. These balloons were introduced in the first world war and employed well into the second (often with women handlers -- uggh that newsreel script!) The advent of high-level bombers reduced their utility against aircraft, but they were still valuable in obstructing lower-level unmanned rockets like the V-1. Believe it or not, there was even a Forbes article in 2022 recommending their use in Ukraine! Fascinating stuff.

Intruder Marriage features her trademark careful development of seemingly-incidental side characters, giving them a backstory and motivating their actions in a way that's really unusual and respectful. Here, it's Miss Thompson, the unsympathetic Women's Services Interviewer whose "brief biographical sketch" is a kind of tragedy of class and gender barriers (55). And Mr. Holiday, the innkeeper in Wales, who's, in my sense, strongly coded as gay, and who's portrayed with great sympathy and given his own happy (though not romantic) ending.

I also appreciated that Bryda's identity as an artist, and her talent and the value of her work, and of art itself, are all treated seriously.

And "London's West End. That Club-at-its-peak, the Flare Path." (31) Could anything be more 40s-cool?

Tags

1940s, English, Europe, England, Europe, Wales, Irish, LGBTQ+ friendly, ambitious, arrogant, artist, athletic, beautiful/handsome, determined, f/m, female, hair, dark, heir/heiress, idealistic, identity, concealed, identity, mistaken, immature, independent, intelligent, marriage of convenience, not the type to fall in love, personal growth/becoming a better person, pilot/aviator, principled, progressive, rich, romance, selfish, soldier, spirited, spoiled, strong f/f friendship, talented, tall, temperamental, third-person, war, wedding, "deathbed", wounded, you were supposed to die!/miraculous recovery, young

Flags

insensitive or outdated language (race/ethnicity/disability/sexual orientation)