This Rough Magic (by Mary Stewart)

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I do enjoy the late Mary Stewart’s writing, although it’s in rather a different genre from my usual reading. She wrote romantic thrillers in the middle and end of last century, with the romance being quite low-key, and the thrilling part usually not too stressful. I have several of her books, and have been re-reading them over the past year, so I was delighted when I found a few that I didn’t have in a charity shop in September.

I have just finished reading one of them, ‘This Rough Magic’. It’s possible that I borrowed it from the library when I was a teenager, which is when I first discovered Mary Stewart. If so, it would have seemed more contemporary, as it was published in 1964. But I had no recollection of it at all, so am assuming I had not previously read it.

The book is narrated by a young woman called Lucy. She has been working as a not very successful actress, and is now ‘resting’. Her sister Phyllida has a house in Corfu, where she has come for a while; she has a wealthy husband and two children, and is expecting her third. The two existing children are rather older, and don’t come into the story at all, neither does her husband. But Lucy has gone to stay with her sister, to keep her company and look after her.

There are often ongoing literary references in Mary Stewart’s novels, and this is no exception. Each chapter starts with a quotation from ‘The Tempest’, and the play is mentioned many times. One of the significant minor characters in the story is Leo, a highly successful actor, who has been through a difficult time with family bereavements, and a possible nervous breakdown. He is staying nearby, in Phyllida’s husband’s ancestral mansion, with his son Max. Leo was known for his rendering of Prospero in ‘The Tempest’ before he withdrew from public life.

There’s a rather dramatic start to the story, when another neighbour, Godfrey, arrives with the bad news that a young man may have drowned. Godfrey is a photographer, and Spiro, who was working for him, fell out of his boat the previous night, but has not been found. Spiro was the twin brother of Miranda who works for Phyllida as a general help.

This is the start of a series of incidents that make Lucy a little nervous, wondering who to trust. As she walks along the beach and swims, she finds disturbing sights. She also rather unexpectedly befriends a dolphin, and suspects someone is trying to shoot him, although she cannot imagine why.

While the characterisation isn’t great, and I didn’t feel any real empathy with any of the people in the book, the story is very well told. Mary Stewart had a tremendous gift of writing at exactly the right pace to give tension and anticipation, and to make it very difficult to put her books down! The unpleasant scenes mostly happen off-stage, and since the story is narrated in the first person, I knew there could be no danger to Lucy herself, although I felt quite apprehensive in the final chapters when she stows away on a boat belonging to the villain of the piece…

There aren’t any real mysteries or surprises; I’d more-or-less worked out who could not be trusted by the time Lucy had accepted it, and I guessed easily who was going to be her romantic interest. The enjoyment of Mary Stewart’s novels is in the process of getting to the inevitable conclusion - and the climax is quite dramatic.

It’s a good story, with the literary references adding some interest, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for something a little different from normal light women’s fiction. Mary Stewart's books seem to be considered modern classics now, and are regularly re-printed.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's Book Reviews