Home » Book Reviews » Mary Stewart » Thunder on the Right by Mary Stewart
Possible spoilers ahead
I do love Mary Stewart’s books as the storylines are fantastic and there is always a great element of suspense and mystery in them, as well as wonderful descriptions of the power of nature. This book sounds like it will live up to my praise, being set in the Valley of the Storms (eeek!) high in the Pyrenees in France near the border with Spain, which I know is a stunning area. And of course there’s a death and all is not as it seems…! I can’t wait to get started!
Jennifer is travelling across the Pyrenees to meet her cousin, Gillian, as Gillian intends to join a convent there and Jennifer is concerned about this decision. However when Jennifer arrives at the lonely convent in the mountains, she is informed that Gillian is dead but the details given about her death don’t seem to add up. She is firstly told that Gillian was too ill and delirious to speak and to mention relatives to be contacted, however she is later told that Gillian had enough moments of lucidity to admire the blue flowers that were put in her room, so Jennifer wonders why Gillian didn’t mention family to contact if she was lucid enough to talk about flowers, and also why she never spoke in her native language of English, particularly in her non-lucid moments. Jennifer then remembers that Gillian was colour-blind so can’t have seen those flowers as blue. Eeeek, it’s all very mysterious already, I admit I got a shiver down my back when Jennifer remembered that Gillian was colour-blind so couldn’t have known that the flowers were blue! And what a gorgeous setting for a convent, though hauntingly isolated by the dramatic mountains and I love Stewart’s depiction of this isolation, ‘The hills waited, the sun beat down steadily on the empty valley, there was no movement but the rush of the white water, no sound but the distant chiming of the bell and the thud of her own heart’, oooh, wonderful!
Jennifer begins to suspect that the dead woman wasn’t Gillian, and thinks that the bursar at the convent, Dona Francisca, knows more than she is admitting. Jennifer gets permission to stay at the convent for a few days, intending to investigate further. She sees someone leaving the grounds at night and follows them, it is Dona Francisca going to the cottage of a local man, Pierre Bussac, and she overhears their conversation in which they reveal that Gillian is there at his cottage, though Dona Francisca tells Bussac that he must kill Gillian by the end of the next day as the risk has become too great with Jennifer asking questions. Jennifer and Stephen (her cousin, who is helping her) suspect that Bussac and Dona Francisca are involved in smuggling criminals out of France into Spain and that they recently tried to smuggle out a bank robber, Lally Dupre, and that Lally asked for a lift into the mountains from Gillian and when their car crashed Lally took Gillian’s identity hoping to elude the authorities, and so it was this woman, Lally, who died, and Gillian is now being kept a prisoner to prevent her talking. There are also valuable rare pictures and statues being housed secretly at the convent unknown to the blind Mother Superior, and Dona Francisca wears grand jewels over her nun’s habit which Jennifer suspects are Dona Francisca’s proceeds from people smuggling. Ooooh, so Gillian is alive, and is there at the man’s cottage! Omg, the tension that Stewart builds up is just so intense, increased so effectively by the scenery and the isolation caused by this scenery and the weather too with its frequent storms! This is the perfect book to read during a storm, I feel, and the way Stewart builds up the tension in the darkness is just amazing, there’s not another writer to touch her, ‘In the windy moonlight the dim outline of mountain and forest bulked huge and uncertain, rain was spattering the panes, and low clouds flung their moving and fitful shadows. And then all at once she saw another shadow, a slight black shadow, moving more purposefully across the garden below than the ghost of any cloud’, eeek, have I mentioned how much I love this author?!
Jennifer and Stephen are determined to rescue Gillian that day before she is killed. Gillian comes to the cottage door while they are talking to Bussac but she doesn’t seem to recognise Jennifer even when she calls her name, so they presume that she lost her memory in the car accident and Bussac has made her believe she is his wife. Bussac and Stephen fight, but Stephen is defeated and they have to retreat. Stephen then goes to the police, but he and Jennifer are now convinced that Bussac does care for Gillian as his wife and think that he may try to cross into Spain with her that night in order to keep her safe from Dona Francisca. The police don’t arrive in time so Jennifer goes back to Bussac’s cottage, where she witnesses Dona Francisca attempting to murder Bussac, as Gillian runs away. Bussac, badly injured, and Jennifer make their way along the dangerous path towards the border with Spain in a storm, to catch up with Gillian and protect her from Dona Francisca. The story ends with Dona Francisca falling from a fragile bridge in the terrible stormy weather, never to be seen again, and Bussac also dying, but Gillian is saved and gradually retrieves her memory.
Wow, what a gripping delicious read, Stewart really is a wonderful author! And I loved Jennifer’s references to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho book as I was reminded of that book too, with the setting of a lonely building in dramatic and inhospitable scenery, the slow building of tension, lots of dark corridors and shadows and doors slowly creaking open, lonely hillsides and impenetrable woods, threatening weather and thunderstorms, secrets and concealments, and seemingly trustworthy people actually being not as trustworthy as first thought! Some of the descriptions could have been straight from Udolpho, Stewart’s words are absolutely fantastic and I feel sure that she loves the Udolpho book as much as I do, such as ‘She woke to thick darkness…wondering…what it was that had woken her. The wind? But it was some slighter sound than this, she knew, that had awakened her, some telling little sound that should not have been…the door. It had been the quiet closing of the door’, omg!!! And ‘As she reached for the candlestick the second match died, and she stood there in the quiet darkness, her mind racing’, wow, the match going out and being plunged into darkness, that is classic Udolpho, I love it! And even more delicious, ‘With that same empty creaking, like the scream of a mouse in a deserted wainscot, the door inched wider’, oh double-eeek!!! I also loved ‘And here, like the hair-prickling draught on the back of the neck, came the feeling that she was being silently watched. From behind’, eeek, and how brilliantly is the addition of those two short words ‘from behind’ just tucked onto the other longer descriptive sentence, it really punches out at you, such amazing writing!
I also loved all the descriptions of the storm and the scenery and the weather, and how the tension was so effectively built up with the threatening tone of these descriptions, whilst still respectfully acknowledging the stunning beauty of the area, such as ‘Away to the north the great storm-cloud mounted and darkened, and its indigo rim reached out to suck down the sun’, and ‘The pine-woods reached out to engulf them. The trees parted, accepted them into a sheltering darkness…the carpet of pine-needles sucked at the feet…drowning the footsteps, the progress of an army along this track…would make no more disturbance than a troop of ghosts, a current of air, a sigh’, wow, that is a beautiful line about the pine needles drowning out the sound, I just love it! I could go on and on as there are sooo many wonderful descriptions in this book, but I’ll choose just two more of my favourite ones (though it’s hard to restrict myself as I jotted down so many, she is such an incredible writer!), ‘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’, it’s almost poetic with the tiny ghost feet! And ‘The mountains were about them, black buttresses blocking out the stars and breaking the force of the wind, devil’s gullies that whistled with their own demoniac storms, great walls of cruel rock that echoed to the slam of the gale and the crackle of the big rain’, shiver, shiver, shiver, I feel like I’m right there in the scene!
I also loved her descriptions of the food too, such as ‘Miss Moon dug into her trout with the dogged efficiency and artistic appreciation of a bulldozer’, tee hee! And ‘she was making again the wonderful discovery that simple greed is one of the purest of human pleasures’, how wonderfully expressed and those lines are so humorous too. There was also humour around family relationships as well, such as ‘Mother and daughter got on very well indeed, with a deep affection founded on almost complete misunderstanding’, tee hee!
I think this has to be my favourite Mary Stewart book so far, it’s just wonderful with the descriptive writing and how she builds up a scene and puts me right there with the character, as well as being such unputdownable edge-of-the seat reading! As ever with a Stewart book, I immediately want to begin at the beginning again the minute I’ve finished and enjoy the delicious feelings of tension and suspense but with the fore-knowledge of who is the baddie and what their plans are! I have a few other Stewart books on my bookcase waiting to be read, Touch Not The Cat, and Nine Coaches Waiting. And I’ve just discovered on Amazon that she wrote a children’s book which sounds adorable, I will have to read that, called The Little Broomstick. And I will also have to re-read Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho too, with being reminded of it by this book.
