Robin Linnet

Robin Linnet by E.F. Benson (2023)

E. F. Benson's "Robin Linnet" opens at St. Stephen's College, Cambridge, where nineteen-year-old Robin Linnet, called "Birds," and his devoted friend Jim Lethbridge, nicknamed Damon and Pythias respectively for their attachment, are translating Plato by candlelight before descending into a bout of horseplay with their friend Badsley ("Badders"). Their easy, teasing intimacy, formed originally at Eton, is established through a night of drinking, ragging, and talk about girls, cricket, and the future. Robin plays a triumphant innings for the university cricket eleven against Middlesex the next day, watched anxiously by Jim, and scores ninety-nine before being caught out. The narrative shifts to the college dons—Jackson, Butler, Waters, and Alison—whose conservative whist-party conversation reveals St. Stephen's fierce resistance to modernization in education, architecture, and manners, and their disdain for the scientifically-minded young fellow Mackenzie and for the irreverent undergraduate paper Camouflage, edited by the provocative Jelf, who needles Robin, Jim, and Badsley for their unthinking conformity to English convention. The scene then moves to Grote, the country house of Robin's mother, Lady Helen Grote, a dazzling, magnetic society hostess estranged in reputation but devoted to her son. Amid a hedonistic house party of aristocrats, artists, and celebrities—including the philosophical Lord Thorley, the caustic Lady Massingberd, the tenor Kuhlmann, the painter Bellingham, and the social climber Mr. Boyton—conversation ranges over snobbery, politics, and the restless pursuit of pleasure that defines Helen's world. Robin arrives dramatically by aeroplane and easily fits into this glittering, morally loose society, flirting and gambling at poker into the night, while his mother reflects privately on time, aging, and the emptiness beneath her constant craving for amusement. The social panorama widens to a lavish dinner and concert given by the ambitious hostess Aline Gurtner and her German-born financier husband, Sir Hermann Gurtner, where diplomatic hints from the German Ambassador about the Kaiser's concern over Irish unrest set Sir Hermann's mind working. After the party, he reveals to Aline that Germany is secretly mobilizing, deduces that Germany is testing whether Britain's Irish troubles will keep her out of a coming war, and spends the night coldly calculating investments to profit from the coming conflict while his sympathies align wholly with Germany, even as Aline can think only of her disrupted social pleasures. Finally, Robin, after weeks of nonstop London dinners, dances, and less respectable nocturnal amusements with Badsley and others, wakes from a dissolute night, scrubs the evidence of it from his hair, and prepares to return to the relative quiet of Cambridge, amused rather than troubled by his own excesses.

By E.F. Benson · First published 2023 · Genre: Novel, Adventure fiction, Literary fiction · 13 chapters · 110,618 words

First lines

Damon and Pythias, collegiately and colloquially known as Day and Pie, were seated in Damon's room in the great quadrangle, on two chairs, side by side, with a candle on the table that guttered in the draught, and a copy of "Socrates's Apology" (in the original Greek) between them. Between them also, propped up against the candle, was a firmly literal translation of what they were reading, to which they both constantly referred. Underneath the candlestick in a far less accessible position, since they desired to consult it much less frequently, was a Greek lexicon. First one of them translated a few lines, with an eye fixed on the English equivalent, and then the other. That was a more sociable way of working than to sit separate and borrow the crib from each other. Besides, there was only one candle, stolen from another fellow's room, as the electric light had, half an hour ago, got tired and gone to sleep.

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fiction · novel · literature · 20th century · British · social commentary · character study · romance · drama · identity · class · relationships

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