Robin Linnet

Robin Linnet by E.F. Benson (2023)

Robin Linnet opens at St. Stephen's College, Cambridge, where two close friends, nicknamed Damon and Pythias — in reality Jim Lethbridge and Robin Linnet, known as "Birds" — are translating Plato by candlelight in Jim's rooms. Their easy intimacy, dating from Eton and renewed at Cambridge, is shown through horseplay with whisky and soda, a wrestling match with a soda siphon, and the trussing-up of their friend Badsley ("Badders") for interrupting them. Robin, an accomplished cricketer about to play for the University, and Jim discuss girls, marriage, and the future with the carelessness of youth, and take a midnight walk to the bridge, where Jim reflects that their friendship has become part of them permanently, "built into" who they are. The next day Robin plays for Cambridge against Middlesex, opening nervously but recovering to score ninety-nine before being caught, an innings that relieves the anxious Jim watching from the pavilion. That evening, in the same rooms, the group is joined by Jelf, editor of the undergraduate paper Camouflage, who mocks his friends' unthinking conformity — their cricket, their girls, their predictable futures — and stages japes such as a fake Victor Hugo poem meant to embarrass the classical tutor Butler. A separate strand follows the dons of St. Stephen's: Jackson, Butler, Waters, and Alison, who meet for whist and conversation that reveals their entrenched conservatism — devotion to Greek and Latin, suspicion of modern art and music, resistance to college reforms such as bathrooms, electric light, and the scientifically minded young Fellow Mackenzie, and a decision to forbid a chapel performance of Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" as too Roman Catholic. Alison alone wonders whether the dons should try to understand the undergraduates and their paper better, but Butler dismisses the idea. The scene shifts to Grote, the country house of Robin's mother, Lady Helen Grote, a magnetic, endlessly hospitable society figure married to Lord Grote. Over a Saturday-to-Monday party attended by Lord Thorley, Lady Massingberd ("Gracie"), the boastful snob Mr. Boyton, the voluble portrait-painter Geoffrey Bellingham, the tenor Kuhlmann, and others, conversation ranges over snobbery, democracy, the younger generation, and the transience of the age's pleasures. Robin arrives spectacularly by aeroplane, joins the poker table, and later punts on the river; his mother notices Kuhlmann's evident admiration for her. In a private scene, Robin and his mother discuss his flirtations (with an actress and with the beautiful, silent Mrs. Lockwater) with unusual candor, and she reflects on her own restless pursuit of vivid experience and the shadow of dissatisfaction that sometimes crosses it. The novel then follows Lady Grote's social rival, Lady Aline Gurtner, wife of the German-born financier Sir Hermann Gurtner, who stages an enormous and lavish party featuring a Royal Princess, Kuhlmann's singing, a new orchestral work conducted by its composer Saalfeld, and a ballet performed by Nijinski, all to cement her arrival in society. During the party, the German Ambassador hints to Aline of the Kaiser's wish to visit England and probes her, unknowingly extracting from her a sense that England fears civil war in Ireland. That night, Sir Hermann receives cipher news from Berlin that Germany is secretly mobilizing under the pretext of "autumn manoeuvres." Turning from the evening's frivolity to hard calculation, he reasons through the likelihood of a general European war, concludes that England will ultimately join in, and dismisses his wife's shallow distress at the disruption to her social plans. Torn between his German sympathies and his financial interests, he nonetheless keeps them separate, issuing telephone orders through the night to sell German and English securities and to buy shipping, coal, and armaments shares, revealing himself to be servicing his fortune, and secretly favoring Germany's ambitions, even as war looms. The narrative returns to Robin in London, who has spent weeks dining, dancing, and flirting nightly, including riotous nights out with Badsley. Waking after one such night with the debris of dissipation about him, he bathes to rid himself of the smell of stale smoke and scent, amused at hazy memories of Badsley's drunken escapades, before preparing to return to a quieter, more studious month at Cambridge. The provided text breaks off here, in the midst of Robin's recollections of the night's events.

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.

What this Textopian page supports

Robin Linnet is listed on Textopian as a novel by E.F. Benson, dated 2023 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Discussion starters

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

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

Contents

More by E.F. Benson