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The Four Feathers
British guardsman Harry Feversham quits his regiment before their deployment to the Sudan, prompting the scorn of his friends and the disavowal of his father. When he receives four white feathers--the symbol of a coward--he must undertake perilous adventures to save his honor.
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1902
About the author
A.E.W. Mason
293 books44 followersMajor Alfred Edward Woodley Mason (7 May 1865 Dulwich, London - 22 November 1948 London) was a British author and politician. He is best remembered for his 1902 novel The Four Feathers.
He studied at Dulwich College and graduated from Trinity College, Oxford in 1888. He was a contemporary of fellow Liberal Anthony Hope, who went on to write the adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda.
His first novel, A Romance of Wastdale, was published in 1895. He was the author of more than 20 books, including At The Villa Rose (1910), a mystery novel in which he introduced his French detective, Inspector Hanaud. His best-known book is The Four Feathers, which has been made into several films. Many consider it his masterpiece. Other books are The House of the Arrow (1924), No Other Tiger (1927), The Prisoner in the Opal (1929) and Fire Over England (1937).
He studied at Dulwich College and graduated from Trinity College, Oxford in 1888. He was a contemporary of fellow Liberal Anthony Hope, who went on to write the adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda.
His first novel, A Romance of Wastdale, was published in 1895. He was the author of more than 20 books, including At The Villa Rose (1910), a mystery novel in which he introduced his French detective, Inspector Hanaud. His best-known book is The Four Feathers, which has been made into several films. Many consider it his masterpiece. Other books are The House of the Arrow (1924), No Other Tiger (1927), The Prisoner in the Opal (1929) and Fire Over England (1937).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 343 reviews
February 7, 2023
This review is from the Kindle edition, March 24, 2011, free on Amazon. Mr. Mason had a way with words. His prose flows and paints almost visible pictures of his characters and scenes. Unfortunately his research skills did not match his writing skills or perhaps he didn't care about accuracy and thought that his readers would feel the same. This led to such things as the oft mentioned Musoline Overture which, despite its importance to the plot, does not exist. After a frustrating session on line, I finally found a November 8, 1902, review in The Spectator Archives. Here is the passage concerning the overture:
"Mr. Mason's sketch of society in Donegal—the home of his heroine—is more remarkable for its sympathy than its inti- mate knowledge of Irish character or manners. We regret to have to add that the unfortunate references to Ethne's accom- plishments as a violinist will render it difficult for any one with the most rudimentary acquaintance with the fiddle to regard her as deserving of sympathy. At all the crucial points of her career she finds vent for her feelings by playing a piece which is called indifferently the Melusine and Musoline overture. Now, in the first place, people do not play overtures on the violin any more than they play single-handed quartets In the second, to allude to an existing and well-known piece like Mendelssohn's Melasine overture, and then to call it Musoline, not once but two or three times, is one of those things that no reviewer can understand."
This seems clear enough, except that internet sources which I consulted name the overture Melusina and Melusine rather than the Melasine of the review or the Musoline of Mr. Mason's novel. The Spectator reviewer was wrong about Mr. Mason referring to the Musoline Overture two or three times. There are many references to it throughout the novel as it assumes some importance to the story. Now we are getting far afield from a book review so I will just say that the little details in the book should not be accepted as accurate without checking. Of course most of us have no interest in checking every detail in a book. We would rather assume that the author, particularly one of Mr. Mason's standing and ability, writes from his knowledge of his subject or conducts rudimentary research. Alas, one can not make that assumption in this case.
THE FOUR FEATHERS is considered by most sources to be an adventure novel but in the first approximately 75% it deals more with romances and related problems. Most mentions of anything which I would consider adventure are discussions of events which happened elsewhere and how those events affect the romance. It says a great deal about Mr. Mason's skill as a writer that the book kept me interested throughout. I do not usually care for an abundance of romance in my reading materials.
I enjoyed the novel much more than I did the 2002 color movie version of the book, but not as much as the 1939 British movie. Not enough adventure and action as well as the whole "Musoline" overture problem which really annoyed the classical music lover in me. So, despite the quality of the prose and the very insightful examinations of honor, courage and cowardice, four stars.
"Mr. Mason's sketch of society in Donegal—the home of his heroine—is more remarkable for its sympathy than its inti- mate knowledge of Irish character or manners. We regret to have to add that the unfortunate references to Ethne's accom- plishments as a violinist will render it difficult for any one with the most rudimentary acquaintance with the fiddle to regard her as deserving of sympathy. At all the crucial points of her career she finds vent for her feelings by playing a piece which is called indifferently the Melusine and Musoline overture. Now, in the first place, people do not play overtures on the violin any more than they play single-handed quartets In the second, to allude to an existing and well-known piece like Mendelssohn's Melasine overture, and then to call it Musoline, not once but two or three times, is one of those things that no reviewer can understand."
This seems clear enough, except that internet sources which I consulted name the overture Melusina and Melusine rather than the Melasine of the review or the Musoline of Mr. Mason's novel. The Spectator reviewer was wrong about Mr. Mason referring to the Musoline Overture two or three times. There are many references to it throughout the novel as it assumes some importance to the story. Now we are getting far afield from a book review so I will just say that the little details in the book should not be accepted as accurate without checking. Of course most of us have no interest in checking every detail in a book. We would rather assume that the author, particularly one of Mr. Mason's standing and ability, writes from his knowledge of his subject or conducts rudimentary research. Alas, one can not make that assumption in this case.
THE FOUR FEATHERS is considered by most sources to be an adventure novel but in the first approximately 75% it deals more with romances and related problems. Most mentions of anything which I would consider adventure are discussions of events which happened elsewhere and how those events affect the romance. It says a great deal about Mr. Mason's skill as a writer that the book kept me interested throughout. I do not usually care for an abundance of romance in my reading materials.
I enjoyed the novel much more than I did the 2002 color movie version of the book, but not as much as the 1939 British movie. Not enough adventure and action as well as the whole "Musoline" overture problem which really annoyed the classical music lover in me. So, despite the quality of the prose and the very insightful examinations of honor, courage and cowardice, four stars.
November 18, 2016
I mentioned this book a while back in my review of Beau Geste as also being somewhat dated by the writing style. I have read it before and was never overly enthralled...but I love the story. It's been copied and made into at least 3 movies I know of (1939, 1978 TV Movie, and 2002). So I decided to give it another read with no distractions. I wanted to read it and not have another book going at the same time.
So, I downloaded an audio version from the library.
The book is one written for late 19th and early 20th century tastes. It was written in 1902. Still if you relax and slide into the narrative it's quite an experience. The book is at heart a romance (and many of my friends here know I'm not a romance fan) but it's a romance in the classic sense. The young protagonist haunted all his life by his own doubts instilled by his father, uncles, grand fathers and so on (unknowingly, this is not cruelty only lack of understanding) he sets a different standard for himself and tries to put others first. In doing this he incurs unjust scorn and damages the people he wanted to protect (all based on an unjust accusation and narrow-minded presumptions). He sets out to right the wrong and "reclaim his honor" in the only way he knows how.
Now as I said, the book was written in 1902 so let me give a heads up. There is non-PC language used in the book. The ubiquitous "N" word is even used. It is not used as a slur but was accepted then. Still I know some will Understandably find it offensive. If this is the case I thought i ought to give a heads up.
If that isn't a deal breaker this is a well written story and remains a classic for a reason.
Now I think I ought to say a little about the movies. I never saw the TV movie so I can't comment on it. As for the 2 feature films. Neither follow the book in their retelling. They both attempt to tell a "close version" of it and you'll probably at least get the flavor.
For my money the 1938 version is by far the better movie. They both combine characters and rewrite some parts mostly for time I suppose (I can't see any other reason for it anyway). The 2002 movie failed to hold my interest. I tried to watch it and my interest waned very quickly. The 1938 version gets the heart of the story right and is much more interesting. They add a more action packed stirring ending to the story and let it tie up more completely than the book does in one way. Still id doesn't actually deviate from the "story line". Of course if all you know is the movie you will miss a great deal of the story and it's nuance. So I'd say enjoy the movies but don't miss the book.
So excellent read...slower style than most books are written in today, but highly recommended.
So, I downloaded an audio version from the library.
The book is one written for late 19th and early 20th century tastes. It was written in 1902. Still if you relax and slide into the narrative it's quite an experience. The book is at heart a romance (and many of my friends here know I'm not a romance fan) but it's a romance in the classic sense. The young protagonist haunted all his life by his own doubts instilled by his father, uncles, grand fathers and so on (unknowingly, this is not cruelty only lack of understanding) he sets a different standard for himself and tries to put others first. In doing this he incurs unjust scorn and damages the people he wanted to protect (all based on an unjust accusation and narrow-minded presumptions). He sets out to right the wrong and "reclaim his honor" in the only way he knows how.
Now as I said, the book was written in 1902 so let me give a heads up. There is non-PC language used in the book. The ubiquitous "N" word is even used. It is not used as a slur but was accepted then. Still I know some will Understandably find it offensive. If this is the case I thought i ought to give a heads up.
If that isn't a deal breaker this is a well written story and remains a classic for a reason.
Now I think I ought to say a little about the movies. I never saw the TV movie so I can't comment on it. As for the 2 feature films. Neither follow the book in their retelling. They both attempt to tell a "close version" of it and you'll probably at least get the flavor.
For my money the 1938 version is by far the better movie. They both combine characters and rewrite some parts mostly for time I suppose (I can't see any other reason for it anyway). The 2002 movie failed to hold my interest. I tried to watch it and my interest waned very quickly. The 1938 version gets the heart of the story right and is much more interesting. They add a more action packed stirring ending to the story and let it tie up more completely than the book does in one way. Still id doesn't actually deviate from the "story line". Of course if all you know is the movie you will miss a great deal of the story and it's nuance. So I'd say enjoy the movies but don't miss the book.
So excellent read...slower style than most books are written in today, but highly recommended.
December 28, 2023
Las cuatro plumas
Libro ambientado al final del siglo XIX en la época colonial británica. Es una novela romántica aventurera que me ha sorprendido por su magnífica historia. Se publicó en 1902.
Cuenta la vida de Harry Feversham, oficial británico casi por obligación al ser hijo de militares, pero con poca vocación para ello. Al intentar cambiar su vida casándose con la mujer que ama, sus "amigos" del regimiento le envían tres plumas blancas que representan la cobardía de Harry. Su prometida, Ethne, viendo el caso, lo rechaza y le indica que prefiere perderlo en la guerra a tener un cobarde en casa. Dicho esto, le entrega una cuarta pluma reprobando su cobardía.
Pues ya tenemos al pobre Harry que no le gusta la guerra repudiado por el establishment general donde el valor y el honor tienen un puesto definido por la sociedad en curso.
A Harry, desde su depresión y con su supuesta cobardía a cuestas, muy a su pesar, no le queda otra que demostrar su valía emprendiendo la tarea de devolver esas cuatro plumas mostrando a esas personas su equivocación.
Es una gran novela, el lector sabe en todo momento lo que ocurre, no así los distintos protagonistas, que se reparten entre los que ignoran el motivo de la no boda de Harry y Ethne, quién envió las plumas, dónde está Harry y qué pretende su amigo, (gran personaje, Durrance) al acercarse a su prometida, ay ay ay.
Dividida la acción entre Inglaterra y la zona del Nilo cerca de Sudán, en sí es una novela romántica con mucha aventura y mucho juego de medias verdades donde se lleva la lealtad hasta el final.
Algo tendrá esta novela que entre 1911 y 2002 se han hecho 7 películas basadas en ella.
Libro ambientado al final del siglo XIX en la época colonial británica. Es una novela romántica aventurera que me ha sorprendido por su magnífica historia. Se publicó en 1902.
Cuenta la vida de Harry Feversham, oficial británico casi por obligación al ser hijo de militares, pero con poca vocación para ello. Al intentar cambiar su vida casándose con la mujer que ama, sus "amigos" del regimiento le envían tres plumas blancas que representan la cobardía de Harry. Su prometida, Ethne, viendo el caso, lo rechaza y le indica que prefiere perderlo en la guerra a tener un cobarde en casa. Dicho esto, le entrega una cuarta pluma reprobando su cobardía.
Pues ya tenemos al pobre Harry que no le gusta la guerra repudiado por el establishment general donde el valor y el honor tienen un puesto definido por la sociedad en curso.
A Harry, desde su depresión y con su supuesta cobardía a cuestas, muy a su pesar, no le queda otra que demostrar su valía emprendiendo la tarea de devolver esas cuatro plumas mostrando a esas personas su equivocación.
Es una gran novela, el lector sabe en todo momento lo que ocurre, no así los distintos protagonistas, que se reparten entre los que ignoran el motivo de la no boda de Harry y Ethne, quién envió las plumas, dónde está Harry y qué pretende su amigo, (gran personaje, Durrance) al acercarse a su prometida, ay ay ay.
Dividida la acción entre Inglaterra y la zona del Nilo cerca de Sudán, en sí es una novela romántica con mucha aventura y mucho juego de medias verdades donde se lleva la lealtad hasta el final.
Algo tendrá esta novela que entre 1911 y 2002 se han hecho 7 películas basadas en ella.
July 30, 2022
Harry Feversham, a young British officer descended from a long line of soldiers, resigns his commission on the eve of his regiment going off to war in Egypt. Three fellow-officers send Feversham white feathers, a symbol of cowardice; his fiancé breaks off their engagement and hands him a fourth feather. Feversham, shamed and depressed almost to the point of suicide, travels incognito to Egypt and the enemy-occupied Sudan to redeem his honor by the performance of brave deeds.
There’s a theme to this story that was derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “…conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Conscience, in the context of the famous quote, means thinking, or more specifically overthinking a difficult problem. Overthinking can delay action with predictably bad results. For an officer, being paralyzed in combat with what the British soldiers of that day called “funk" is the worst thing imaginable. Harry Fevershem is, Hamlet-like, far more imaginative than his stolid retired general father and his “stiff upper-lip” peers. Fevershem’s dilemma is not that he’s a coward; in fact, he’s very brave. His misfortune is that a vivid imagination has led Harry to fear that he’s a coward who will fail the test when the time comes.
The Hamlet reference comes up in a conversation between Harry and Lieutenant Sutch, an old retired naval officer and friend of Harry’s father. Sutch takes a fatherly interest in Harry, and it’s implied throughout the novel that the lieutenant was at one time in love with Harry’s long deceased mother.
"Did you ever read 'Hamlet'?" he asked. "Of course," said Harry, in reply.
"Ah, but did you consider it? The same disability is clear in that character. The thing which he foresaw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in the consequence—that he shrank from, upbraiding himself even as you have done. Yet when the moment of action comes, sharp and immediate, does he fail? No, he excels, and just by reason of that foresight.”
My brief synopsis should be familiar to anyone who has seen a film version—there are several—of Mason’s novel. While the synopsized plot is essentially the same, the screenplays differ, to a greater or lesser extent, from each other and the novel. Many novels are difficult, and in some cases almost impossible, to faithfully adapt for the screen; “The Four Feathers” is difficult at best.
“The Four Feathers” is more early Edwardian literary fiction than Kiplingesque adventure. A strictly faithful screen adaptation would probably have bored audiences. My favorite version, the 1939 Technicolor epic, took liberties with the characters and their relationships as well as the historical setting while adding plenty of action; these changes contributed to making the film a perennial classic and a box-office hit.
The screenwriters simplified and stream-lined the story, changing, combining or eliminating key characters. They also transferred the historical timeline to place the action in the 1890s, culminating in the Battle of Omdurman, a great British victory, rather than the less inspiring 1880s. This isn’t surprising. The film was released in the UK in April of 1939 when Europe was on the brink of war.
One of the most striking changes, and there are indeed several, from novel to screen, is the relationship among Harry Fevershem, Jack Durrance and Ethne Eustace (Ethne Burroughs, In the film) and Mrs. Adair, a character who was trimmed from the screenplay. Most interesting to me was the change in Jack Durrance. While he was portrayed sympathetically in the film, a great performance by Sir Ralph Richardson, Durrance is more prominent in the novel, arguably a co-hero to Harry Feversham, and a tragic one at that.
Mason’s literary style was pre-cinematic and will be familiar to readers of Victorian and Edwardian literature. He used poetic descriptions of the Irish countryside and the Sudanese desert to set a mood that reflected his character’s thoughts and emotions; films accomplish that visually, without the need for words. Mason also spent a great deal of time on both physical and psychological descriptions of his characters, exploring their motives, contradictions and misunderstandings at great length. A film must rely primarily on showing as opposed to telling and the emphasis on showing rather than telling had a significant impact on the development of 20th century fiction. In addition, the film used action and fast pacing throughout, building up to a rousing climax; in the novel, the pace and the action pick up, but only in the climactic scenes near the novel’s end.
A brief word about Ethne’s violin playing. Thankfully, it was left out of the film. Mason used it as Ethne’s means of non-verbal “spiritual” communication to both Feversham and Durrance. Other reviewers have commented on it and her favorite piece, the so-called “Musiline Overture”. This obscure, or more likely non-existent piece plays an important role in the narrative. Don’t waste time trying to look it up. Mason might have been referring to a violin arrangement of Mendelsohn’s “Fair Melusine Overture,” but that’s just a guess. At any rate, it’s a vestige of Victorian sentimentality and melodrama that was already going out of fashion when the novel was published in 1902.
I wouldn’t judge the film by the novel or the novel by the film; they are products of different media made for different times. While the novel lacks much of the action and adventure of the film, it still held my interest and kept me engaged throughout. Mason’s “word painting” descriptions are excellent, his characters psychologically complex; all things considered, it’s a good read.
There’s a theme to this story that was derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “…conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Conscience, in the context of the famous quote, means thinking, or more specifically overthinking a difficult problem. Overthinking can delay action with predictably bad results. For an officer, being paralyzed in combat with what the British soldiers of that day called “funk" is the worst thing imaginable. Harry Fevershem is, Hamlet-like, far more imaginative than his stolid retired general father and his “stiff upper-lip” peers. Fevershem’s dilemma is not that he’s a coward; in fact, he’s very brave. His misfortune is that a vivid imagination has led Harry to fear that he’s a coward who will fail the test when the time comes.
The Hamlet reference comes up in a conversation between Harry and Lieutenant Sutch, an old retired naval officer and friend of Harry’s father. Sutch takes a fatherly interest in Harry, and it’s implied throughout the novel that the lieutenant was at one time in love with Harry’s long deceased mother.
"Did you ever read 'Hamlet'?" he asked. "Of course," said Harry, in reply.
"Ah, but did you consider it? The same disability is clear in that character. The thing which he foresaw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in the consequence—that he shrank from, upbraiding himself even as you have done. Yet when the moment of action comes, sharp and immediate, does he fail? No, he excels, and just by reason of that foresight.”
My brief synopsis should be familiar to anyone who has seen a film version—there are several—of Mason’s novel. While the synopsized plot is essentially the same, the screenplays differ, to a greater or lesser extent, from each other and the novel. Many novels are difficult, and in some cases almost impossible, to faithfully adapt for the screen; “The Four Feathers” is difficult at best.
“The Four Feathers” is more early Edwardian literary fiction than Kiplingesque adventure. A strictly faithful screen adaptation would probably have bored audiences. My favorite version, the 1939 Technicolor epic, took liberties with the characters and their relationships as well as the historical setting while adding plenty of action; these changes contributed to making the film a perennial classic and a box-office hit.
The screenwriters simplified and stream-lined the story, changing, combining or eliminating key characters. They also transferred the historical timeline to place the action in the 1890s, culminating in the Battle of Omdurman, a great British victory, rather than the less inspiring 1880s. This isn’t surprising. The film was released in the UK in April of 1939 when Europe was on the brink of war.
One of the most striking changes, and there are indeed several, from novel to screen, is the relationship among Harry Fevershem, Jack Durrance and Ethne Eustace (Ethne Burroughs, In the film) and Mrs. Adair, a character who was trimmed from the screenplay. Most interesting to me was the change in Jack Durrance. While he was portrayed sympathetically in the film, a great performance by Sir Ralph Richardson, Durrance is more prominent in the novel, arguably a co-hero to Harry Feversham, and a tragic one at that.
Mason’s literary style was pre-cinematic and will be familiar to readers of Victorian and Edwardian literature. He used poetic descriptions of the Irish countryside and the Sudanese desert to set a mood that reflected his character’s thoughts and emotions; films accomplish that visually, without the need for words. Mason also spent a great deal of time on both physical and psychological descriptions of his characters, exploring their motives, contradictions and misunderstandings at great length. A film must rely primarily on showing as opposed to telling and the emphasis on showing rather than telling had a significant impact on the development of 20th century fiction. In addition, the film used action and fast pacing throughout, building up to a rousing climax; in the novel, the pace and the action pick up, but only in the climactic scenes near the novel’s end.
A brief word about Ethne’s violin playing. Thankfully, it was left out of the film. Mason used it as Ethne’s means of non-verbal “spiritual” communication to both Feversham and Durrance. Other reviewers have commented on it and her favorite piece, the so-called “Musiline Overture”. This obscure, or more likely non-existent piece plays an important role in the narrative. Don’t waste time trying to look it up. Mason might have been referring to a violin arrangement of Mendelsohn’s “Fair Melusine Overture,” but that’s just a guess. At any rate, it’s a vestige of Victorian sentimentality and melodrama that was already going out of fashion when the novel was published in 1902.
I wouldn’t judge the film by the novel or the novel by the film; they are products of different media made for different times. While the novel lacks much of the action and adventure of the film, it still held my interest and kept me engaged throughout. Mason’s “word painting” descriptions are excellent, his characters psychologically complex; all things considered, it’s a good read.
September 3, 2011
A. E. W. Mason wrote this gem in 1902; it is still the most romantic adventure novel ever written. Made into a wonderful movie of the same name, this story reads even better than it plays on the screen. The prose is limpid, the insights into pre-WWI mores profound, and the settings unforgettable.
Mason makes me believe that we've lost more than we've gained in the century since he wrote. His descriptions of the pre-motorcar (Irish) countryside convince me that we will never see the country the same way again. His insights into human conduct convince me that the romantic hero and heroine did die in the killing fields of WWI -- forever. And his narrative of individual heroism convinces me that the world has grown larger, more impersonal, and less impressionable than it was then.
Yes, I read this book on a Kindle app on an iPad, but technology is no substitute for humanity, and where is the soul in a machine?
Mason makes me believe that we've lost more than we've gained in the century since he wrote. His descriptions of the pre-motorcar (Irish) countryside convince me that we will never see the country the same way again. His insights into human conduct convince me that the romantic hero and heroine did die in the killing fields of WWI -- forever. And his narrative of individual heroism convinces me that the world has grown larger, more impersonal, and less impressionable than it was then.
Yes, I read this book on a Kindle app on an iPad, but technology is no substitute for humanity, and where is the soul in a machine?
December 21, 2014
8 JUL 2014 -- Call me crazy, but why is this billed as an adventure tale? Seems more of a romance to me or a study of feelings. I love it!
Response to a comment by Dagny: Thanks Dagny. I am at Chap. XIV. So far, adventure has been spoken of and hinted at, but not yet fully experienced. I am positive adventure is yet to come and I am patiently awaiting its arrival. Just the same, I am finding the characters' developing personalities extremely interesting.
I will give away no spoilers; yet, I can say The Four Feathers is much more a study of feelings and matters of the heart than it is a boy-adventure book.
Thanks to you all (Karen, Dagny, and Cheryl) for such a great book. I love it!
P.S.
I enjoyed this book so much I even purchased a real-book copy despite having a copy on my ipod. I picked up the Barnes & Noble Classics edition. The Introduction is superb. I do not read Intros until I have finished reading because I have discovered too many times that the Intro contains spoilers of which I may/may not want to be aware. Really, I have been known to read the last chapter first (well, I need to know how it all ends); however, in this case, I did not read the ending first. I could almost have turned to the last page and turned back to the first again. The Four Feathers is a keeper!
Download it here -- http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18883
Response to a comment by Dagny: Thanks Dagny. I am at Chap. XIV. So far, adventure has been spoken of and hinted at, but not yet fully experienced. I am positive adventure is yet to come and I am patiently awaiting its arrival. Just the same, I am finding the characters' developing personalities extremely interesting.
I will give away no spoilers; yet, I can say The Four Feathers is much more a study of feelings and matters of the heart than it is a boy-adventure book.
Thanks to you all (Karen, Dagny, and Cheryl) for such a great book. I love it!
P.S.
I enjoyed this book so much I even purchased a real-book copy despite having a copy on my ipod. I picked up the Barnes & Noble Classics edition. The Introduction is superb. I do not read Intros until I have finished reading because I have discovered too many times that the Intro contains spoilers of which I may/may not want to be aware. Really, I have been known to read the last chapter first (well, I need to know how it all ends); however, in this case, I did not read the ending first. I could almost have turned to the last page and turned back to the first again. The Four Feathers is a keeper!
Download it here -- http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18883
August 29, 2012
The Heath Ledger movie makes you think this book is an action thriller. That is false. Mason's work is a look into the emotions and decisions made by extraordinary people.
What war or fighting is described in this novel is described by characters who participated in it, and most of the story takes place in England, minus a couple chapters in Egypt and Sudan. This instead focuses on two characters trying to learn something about themselves- a confused young man who quits the military but must fight to regain his honor, a conflicted woman who loved him but now finds herself torn between her hope of his return and the affections of his friend.
Mason's prose reads quickly and cleanly, but the book's greatest achievement is that he speaks of the main character mostly through the eyes and mouths of others who experience him- an interesting construct not many authors utilize. Despite the age of the book, Mason has successfully given it extra life.
A must for fans of literature in general due to the author's execution of that plot device, and a great tale of love's perseverance in a time of war.
What war or fighting is described in this novel is described by characters who participated in it, and most of the story takes place in England, minus a couple chapters in Egypt and Sudan. This instead focuses on two characters trying to learn something about themselves- a confused young man who quits the military but must fight to regain his honor, a conflicted woman who loved him but now finds herself torn between her hope of his return and the affections of his friend.
Mason's prose reads quickly and cleanly, but the book's greatest achievement is that he speaks of the main character mostly through the eyes and mouths of others who experience him- an interesting construct not many authors utilize. Despite the age of the book, Mason has successfully given it extra life.
A must for fans of literature in general due to the author's execution of that plot device, and a great tale of love's perseverance in a time of war.
June 14, 2021
An adventure novel should earn its title, and The Four Feathers certainly does. Unexpected betrayal; a daring rescue; deus-ex-machinaed hope amidst the pit of despair; it's all here.
Still, The Four is pleasantly unique, and what sets it apart from the others of its genre is its surprisingly modern definition of courage—what it is, and how exactly one achieves such a state.
Let's zoom in on comparable swashbucklers and their archetypal heroes: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Cyrano de Bergerac, Zorro, The Three Musketeers, for a few.
All brave, all charming, all courageous. Never is there a single moment where one would be able to accuse these characters of cowardice, and certainly those who do would theoretically incur the anger of these fictional men. There are moments of fear and definitely some of stupidity, but all bear the flag of Protagonist (TM) with remarkable alacrity as they dive headlong into the proverbial den of lions, no questions asked. Their overwhelming aristeia—that is, their excellence in battle and strategy—marks them above their counterparts.
Harry is different. In a "not your typical adventure novel" twist, Mason's hero is uniquely fearful of 1) being afraid and 2) dying while being afraid. He reeks of this impression for the longest time, and is only reversed starting from chapter 27 (out of 34) at which point he reappears stinking of eau de panache. How did this happen, what caused this transformation? Don't ask, he's a Protagonist (TM) now.
Regardless of how it happened, Harry's trajectory has a precedent that extends as far and as early as the first of our written stories: The Epic of Gilgamesh. Our hero Gilgamesh is definitely a man. He's so much a man that his equal-in-every-way counterpart, Enkidu, couples with a woman for seven whole days. He's so much a man that he kills a literal forest god, and when the other gods send the Bull of Heaven to avenge that god, he kills that too. And that's all before he cuts the bull's leg off and hurls it at the goddess of love and war.
All brave, periodically charming, inarguably all courageous. And yet, such a manly man somehow develops a rabidly violent fear of death. So much so that he travels to what we can colloquially call the underworld in search of immortality.
His fear, and Harry's too, is as universal as it is understandable which is why The Four Feathers is allowed to rest on the swashbuckler section of the shelf, though I posit that The Four is less swashbuckler and a great deal more drama/romance. Either way, a decent read.
Still, The Four is pleasantly unique, and what sets it apart from the others of its genre is its surprisingly modern definition of courage—what it is, and how exactly one achieves such a state.
Let's zoom in on comparable swashbucklers and their archetypal heroes: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Cyrano de Bergerac, Zorro, The Three Musketeers, for a few.
All brave, all charming, all courageous. Never is there a single moment where one would be able to accuse these characters of cowardice, and certainly those who do would theoretically incur the anger of these fictional men. There are moments of fear and definitely some of stupidity, but all bear the flag of Protagonist (TM) with remarkable alacrity as they dive headlong into the proverbial den of lions, no questions asked. Their overwhelming aristeia—that is, their excellence in battle and strategy—marks them above their counterparts.
Harry is different. In a "not your typical adventure novel" twist, Mason's hero is uniquely fearful of 1) being afraid and 2) dying while being afraid. He reeks of this impression for the longest time, and is only reversed starting from chapter 27 (out of 34) at which point he reappears stinking of eau de panache. How did this happen, what caused this transformation? Don't ask, he's a Protagonist (TM) now.
Regardless of how it happened, Harry's trajectory has a precedent that extends as far and as early as the first of our written stories: The Epic of Gilgamesh. Our hero Gilgamesh is definitely a man. He's so much a man that his equal-in-every-way counterpart, Enkidu, couples with a woman for seven whole days. He's so much a man that he kills a literal forest god, and when the other gods send the Bull of Heaven to avenge that god, he kills that too. And that's all before he cuts the bull's leg off and hurls it at the goddess of love and war.
All brave, periodically charming, inarguably all courageous. And yet, such a manly man somehow develops a rabidly violent fear of death. So much so that he travels to what we can colloquially call the underworld in search of immortality.
His fear, and Harry's too, is as universal as it is understandable which is why The Four Feathers is allowed to rest on the swashbuckler section of the shelf, though I posit that The Four is less swashbuckler and a great deal more drama/romance. Either way, a decent read.
November 11, 2009
This has been one of my favorite movies ever since I first watched it on the big-screen, so I decided to read the book just this week when I found it on my shelves.
Wow. The movie is incredible, and so is the book. They're both very different; the movie focuses mainly on Harry and how he atones for his disgrace, but the book focuses more on Ethne and her suffering and poor, sweet Jack.
This is a tale of wonderful friendship and drive, but the character that touched me most was Jack. Jack who sacrificed so much and whose love was so infinite that he did everything to make Ethne happy, even when it meant sacrificing his own happiness.
This book is filled with tragic characters-- Mrs. Adaire being the most classic example. It broke my heart, and my heart broke over and over for Ethne, Jack, Harry, and Sutch. I'm just too awe-struck to form many coherent thoughts about this book.
I spent my whole experience reading this book frustrated and torn, but I absolutely loved the book. It is incredible, and much more than just an adventure-novel.
Wow. The movie is incredible, and so is the book. They're both very different; the movie focuses mainly on Harry and how he atones for his disgrace, but the book focuses more on Ethne and her suffering and poor, sweet Jack.
This is a tale of wonderful friendship and drive, but the character that touched me most was Jack. Jack who sacrificed so much and whose love was so infinite that he did everything to make Ethne happy, even when it meant sacrificing his own happiness.
This book is filled with tragic characters-- Mrs. Adaire being the most classic example. It broke my heart, and my heart broke over and over for Ethne, Jack, Harry, and Sutch. I'm just too awe-struck to form many coherent thoughts about this book.
I spent my whole experience reading this book frustrated and torn, but I absolutely loved the book. It is incredible, and much more than just an adventure-novel.
July 25, 2014
Free download available at Project Gutenberg.
Review is pending....
Review is pending....
January 5, 2022
This wonderful book is often mistaken and read as a pro-imperialistic novel. A good argument against such a viewpoint would be the author's depiction of men from different races as a complex mixture of good and evil. In fact, the plot suggests that all races are equal and that goodness, bravery, hatred, love, vileness and so forth are personal rather than racial traits.
In this manner, the novel rather denounces imperialism. Through the progress of Harry Feversham, the latter doctrine is depicted as meaningless and unjust since it required of people to fight and die for an ideal in which they no longer believed.
At the same time, the plot explores social prejudice by the turn of the century. Both femininity and masculinity were, then, under the confining rule of rigid Victorian ideals. Thus, in refusing to fight for a purpose in which he did not believe, Harry was regarded by his community as a coward. This blemish upon his reputation had instilled in him a desire to rise above all such judgement and prove his worth and valor to those he loved as well as those who looked down upon him. Overall, this is an intent tale of adventure, social conflicts, and human nature. Very enjoyable!
In this manner, the novel rather denounces imperialism. Through the progress of Harry Feversham, the latter doctrine is depicted as meaningless and unjust since it required of people to fight and die for an ideal in which they no longer believed.
At the same time, the plot explores social prejudice by the turn of the century. Both femininity and masculinity were, then, under the confining rule of rigid Victorian ideals. Thus, in refusing to fight for a purpose in which he did not believe, Harry was regarded by his community as a coward. This blemish upon his reputation had instilled in him a desire to rise above all such judgement and prove his worth and valor to those he loved as well as those who looked down upon him. Overall, this is an intent tale of adventure, social conflicts, and human nature. Very enjoyable!
December 4, 2015
Qué libro... QUÉ LIBRO!!! Me atrapó desde el principio. Y es que no me esperaba para nada una historia así. De las historias más bonitas de amor que he leído. Los temas del honor personal, la imagen que tenemos de nosotros mismos y la sensación del deber para con otros, está tan bien planteado (al menos desde mi punto de vista). Luego las descripciones del norte de África y de Gales son exquisitas. Y los personajes me han enamorado, al principio parecen planos pero, según vas avanzando en la historia, ves que hay más, que son muy reales y que sienten con mucha intensidad su situación.
Resumiendo, me ha encantado.
Resumiendo, me ha encantado.
March 16, 2024
5 stars. This book was nothing like I expected—quite unique—but very good, and very enjoyable.
1882 England—the Mahdist War in Sudan. Not a very well-known war, but I have been well briefed by Henty (With Kitchener in Sudan, The Dash for Khartoum) and I was delighted to see a different spin on the typical “British soldier boy” spin so common in late Victorian books. Mason’s writing style was pleasant—easy to read yet deep. His setting ranged from small village Ireland to London to the capital of Sudan. And his characters were splendid.
This book reminded me of Henty’s Rujub, the Juggler, which features a hero who is the Typical Excellent Englishman except for one default—a tremendous fear of noise. Mason, however, tackles a different aspect of fear—the fear of being a coward. Harry Feversham, the descendant of an unbroken line of (unimaginative, insensitive) soldiers, is also the possessor of imagination and sensibility from his mother, now dead. Bred to take his place in the army, the young man is consumed with the terror that he will prove himself a coward… His journey reminded me a little of Walter Blythe’s in Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside, although Harry is in no way like Walter. He was, however, an excellent character.
Durrance was a splendid “best friend” and a wonderful man in his own right. I was awed by his fortitude and couldn’t pick which man I admire more, nor which one inspires me most. Ethne was a strong, lovely woman, and the third inspiring character of the novel. Finally, Sutch was delightfully sturdy and loveable. The minor characters, although none of them were admirable (except for Ibrahim—splendid chap that), were enjoyably unique and humorous… and I did end up liking them in the end, somehow. It wasn’t their fault they were idiots; and most of them meant well, really.
The plot of the book was absolutely gripping. I was desperate for Harry to complete his mission—and I despaired of it. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted Harry or Durrance to win—and I felt so much for Ethne. I was horrified by Durrance’s accident, but I loved the way he handled it… The book shed a strong light on topics seldom covered by vintage “soldier” books—physical disablement, mental struggles, torture and imprisonment, etc. Although there was no “moral,” the characters lived out their own morals and left me with very deep thoughts about my own character.
To sum it all up, this was a delightful, well done, deep book that I look forwards to revisiting, and I would love to read more by this author.
Content: a few instances of language; mentions of drinking and smoking; a mention of a particularly gruesome method of torture.
A Favourite Quote: The bad thing which he had done so long ago was not even by his six years of labour to be destroyed. It was still to live, its consequence was to be sorrow till the end of life for another than himself.
1882 England—the Mahdist War in Sudan. Not a very well-known war, but I have been well briefed by Henty (With Kitchener in Sudan, The Dash for Khartoum) and I was delighted to see a different spin on the typical “British soldier boy” spin so common in late Victorian books. Mason’s writing style was pleasant—easy to read yet deep. His setting ranged from small village Ireland to London to the capital of Sudan. And his characters were splendid.
This book reminded me of Henty’s Rujub, the Juggler, which features a hero who is the Typical Excellent Englishman except for one default—a tremendous fear of noise. Mason, however, tackles a different aspect of fear—the fear of being a coward. Harry Feversham, the descendant of an unbroken line of (unimaginative, insensitive) soldiers, is also the possessor of imagination and sensibility from his mother, now dead. Bred to take his place in the army, the young man is consumed with the terror that he will prove himself a coward… His journey reminded me a little of Walter Blythe’s in Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside, although Harry is in no way like Walter. He was, however, an excellent character.
Durrance was a splendid “best friend” and a wonderful man in his own right. I was awed by his fortitude and couldn’t pick which man I admire more, nor which one inspires me most. Ethne was a strong, lovely woman, and the third inspiring character of the novel. Finally, Sutch was delightfully sturdy and loveable. The minor characters, although none of them were admirable (except for Ibrahim—splendid chap that), were enjoyably unique and humorous… and I did end up liking them in the end, somehow. It wasn’t their fault they were idiots; and most of them meant well, really.
The plot of the book was absolutely gripping. I was desperate for Harry to complete his mission—and I despaired of it. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted Harry or Durrance to win—and I felt so much for Ethne. I was horrified by Durrance’s accident, but I loved the way he handled it… The book shed a strong light on topics seldom covered by vintage “soldier” books—physical disablement, mental struggles, torture and imprisonment, etc. Although there was no “moral,” the characters lived out their own morals and left me with very deep thoughts about my own character.
To sum it all up, this was a delightful, well done, deep book that I look forwards to revisiting, and I would love to read more by this author.
Content: a few instances of language; mentions of drinking and smoking; a mention of a particularly gruesome method of torture.
A Favourite Quote: The bad thing which he had done so long ago was not even by his six years of labour to be destroyed. It was still to live, its consequence was to be sorrow till the end of life for another than himself.
February 4, 2022
Otra de esas joyas que como este año que aún está comenzando, han llegado a mis manos sin tener ni puñetera idea de su existencia, salvo por una vaga referencia al clásico de 1937. Y me ha encantado, no puedo decir menos.
Es extraño porque pese a la poca información que tenía previa, tenía entendido que era un clásico de aventuras. Aventuras en el desierto concretamente. Y cuánta ha sido mi sorpresa al descubrir que es mucho más: un ensayo filosófico sobre lo que significa ser un cobarde, sobre la voluntad humana, la responsabilidad, el deber y el honor que en los tiempos en los que fue escrita esta novela, regían el mundo y que hoy en día por desgracia, anda muy desaparecidos.
Tres personajes principales inolvidables que van entretejiendo un relato que es exquisito.
Es extraño porque pese a la poca información que tenía previa, tenía entendido que era un clásico de aventuras. Aventuras en el desierto concretamente. Y cuánta ha sido mi sorpresa al descubrir que es mucho más: un ensayo filosófico sobre lo que significa ser un cobarde, sobre la voluntad humana, la responsabilidad, el deber y el honor que en los tiempos en los que fue escrita esta novela, regían el mundo y que hoy en día por desgracia, anda muy desaparecidos.
Tres personajes principales inolvidables que van entretejiendo un relato que es exquisito.
November 23, 2016
A delightful romance in the traditional sense where bravery and honor trump all. The hero commits an act of cowardliness through fear of not being brave enough and fights to redeem his name. Those around him act nobly. Good stuff. Fairly fast read, though slow to get into at first.
June 9, 2016
A great and wonderful book about love and honor, and spending every ounce of human endeavor toward redemption and forgiveness. I highly recommend this book.
June 7, 2023
The Four Feathers is a 1902 adventure novel by British writer A. E. W. Mason published in 1901 in the Cornhill Magazine, published monthly for a year. It has inspired many films of the same title, seven that I know of. The first was in 1915, a silent film of course, the last in 2002, not a silent film, that's all I know of. A 1929 silent version has wild hippos in a river attack on our hero. I remember nothing about any attacking hippos in the book, but it does sound like the most interesting of the movies. In the book, and all the movies that I know of, our hero, British officer Harry Feversham resigns from his commission in the Royal North Surrey Regiment just before Lord Wolseley's 1882 expedition to Egypt to suppress the rising of Colonel Ahmed Orabi. Because he does this he receives three white feathers from his three closest friends, and another one from his fiancée, Ethne Eustace. But why a white feather? Why not a black feather, or blue, or red? I wanted to know why white birds are less brave than their black brother birds so I looked it up. Not birds being cowards, but white feathers. What I found is more interesting than the book:
The white feather is a widely recognised propaganda symbol. It has, among other things, represented cowardice or conscientious pacifism; as in A. E. W. Mason's 1902 book, The Four Feathers. In Britain during the First World War it was often given to males out of uniform by women to shame them publicly into signing up. In the United States armed forces, however, it is used to signify extraordinary bravery and excellence in combat marksmanship.
The use of the phrase "white feather" to symbolise cowardice is attested from the late 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED cites A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), in which lexicographer Francis Grose wrote "White feather, he has a white feather, he is a coward, an allusion to a game cock, where having a white feather, is a proof he is not of the true game breed". This was in the context of cockfighting, a common entertainment in Georgian England.
At the start of World War I, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, who was a strong advocate of conscription, wanted to increase the number of those enlisting in the armed forces. Therefore he organized on 30 August 1914 a group of thirty women in his home town of Folkestone to hand out white feathers to any men that were not in uniform. Fitzgerald believed using women to shame the men into enlisting would be the most effective method of encouraging enlistment. The group that he founded (with prominent members being Emma Orczy and the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward) was known as the White Feather Brigade or the Order of the White Feather.
Although the draft would conscript both sexes, only males would be on the front lines. While the true effectiveness of the campaign is impossible to judge, it spread throughout several other nations in the empire. In Britain, it started to cause problems for the government when public servants and men in essential occupations came under pressure to enlist. That prompted Home Secretary Reginald McKenna to issue employees in state industries with lapel badges reading "King and Country" to indicate that they were serving the war effort. Likewise, the Silver War Badge, which was given to service personnel who had been honourably discharged by wounds or sickness, was first issued in September 1916 to prevent veterans from being challenged for not wearing uniform. Anecdotes from the time indicate that the campaign was unpopular among soldiers, not least because soldiers who were home on leave could find themselves presented with feathers.
One example was Private Ernest Atkins, who was on leave from the Western Front. He was riding a tram when he was presented with a white feather by a girl sitting behind him. He smacked her across the face with his pay book and said, "Certainly I'll take your feather back to the boys at Passchendaele. I'm in civvies because people think my uniform might be lousy, but if I had it on I wouldn't be half as lousy as you".
Private Norman Demuth, who had been discharged from the British Army after he had been wounded in 1916, received numerous white feathers after he returned from the Western Front. In Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Demuth is quoted as saying:
"Almost the last feather I received was on a bus. I was sitting near the door when I became aware of two women on the other side talking at me, and I thought to myself, 'Oh Lord, here we go again'. One lent forward and produced a feather and said, 'Here's a gift for a brave soldier. I took it and said,'Thank you very much- I wanted one of those.' Then I took my pipe out of my pocket and put this feather down the stem and worked it in a way I've never worked a pipe cleaner before. When it was filthy I pulled it out and said, 'You know, we didn't get these in the trenches', and handed it back to her. She instinctively put out her hand and took it, so there she was sitting with this filthy pipe cleaner in her hand and all the other people on the bus began to get indignant. Then she dropped it and got up to get out, but we were nowhere near a stopping place and the bus went on quite a long way while she got well and truly barracked by the rest of the people on the bus. I sat back and laughed like mad."
Supporters of the campaign were not easily put off. A woman who confronted a young man in a London park demanded to know why he was not in the army. "Because I am a German", he replied. He received a white feather anyway.
Occasionally injured veterans were mistakenly targeted, such as Reuben W. Farrow who after being aggressively asked by a woman on a tram why he would not do his duty, turned around and showed his missing hand causing her to apologize.
Perhaps the most misplaced use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.
Roland Gwynne, later the mayor of Eastbourne (1929–1931), received a feather from a relative. That prompted him to enlist, and he would receive the Distinguished Service Order for bravery.
The writer Compton Mackenzie, then a serving soldier, complained about the activities of the Order of the White Feather. He argued that "idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired". The pacifist Fenner Brockway said he received so many white feathers that he had enough to make a fan.
I wonder how many birds lost their lives during war just for their feathers. The black, blue, and red birds were probably happy to give their white brothers the spotlight. So, in this book Harry has received four of these feathers. Poor Harry as a boy had sat and listened to the soldiers sit around his father's table telling war stories. His father was General Feversham, and his father before that, and before that, on and on. All brave soldiers. But now he is listening to stories of men who weren't so brave:
"Lord Wilmington. One of the best names in England, if you please. Did you ever see his house in Warwickshire? Every inch of the ground you would think would have a voice to bid him play the man, if only in remembrance of his fathers.... It seemed incredible and mere camp rumour, but the rumour grew. If it was whispered at the Alma, it was spoken aloud at Inkermann, it was shouted at Balaclava. Before Sebastopol the hideous thing was proved. Wilmington was acting as galloper to his general. I believe upon my soul the general chose him for the duty, so that the fellow might set himself right. There were three hundred yards of bullet-swept flat ground, and a message to be carried across them. Had Wilmington toppled off his horse on the way, why, there were the whispers silenced for ever. Had he ridden through alive he earned distinction besides. But he didn't dare; he refused! Imagine it if you can! He sat shaking on his horse and declined. You should have seen the general. His face turned the colour of that Burgundy. 'No doubt you have a previous engagement,' he said, in the politest voice you ever heard—just that, not a word of abuse. A previous engagement on the battlefield! For the life of me, I could hardly help laughing. But it was a tragic business for Wilmington. He was broken, of course, and slunk back to London. Every house was closed to him; he dropped out of his circle like a lead bullet you let slip out of your hand into the sea. The very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke to them; and he blew his brains out in a back bedroom off the Haymarket. Curious that, eh? He hadn't the pluck to face the bullets when his name was at stake, yet he could blow his own brains out afterwards."
Lieutenant Sutch chanced to look at the clock as the story came to an end. It was now a quarter to one. Harry Feversham had still a quarter of an hour's furlough, and that quarter of an hour was occupied by a retired surgeon-general with a great wagging beard, who sat nearly opposite to the boy.
"I can tell you an incident still more curious," he said. "The man in this case had never been under fire before, but he was of my own profession. Life and death were part of his business. Nor was he really in any particular danger. The affair happened during a hill campaign in India. We were encamped in a valley, and a few Pathans used to lie out on the hillside at night and take long shots into the camp. A bullet ripped through the canvas of the hospital tent—that was all. The surgeon crept out to his own quarters, and his orderly discovered him half-an-hour afterward lying in his blood stone-dead."
"Hit?" exclaimed the major.
"Not a bit of it," said the surgeon. "He had quietly opened his instrument-case in the dark, taken out a lancet, and severed his femoral artery. Sheer panic, do you see, at the whistle of a bullet."
And listening to these stories Harry becomes afraid. But we're told he is not a coward; in fact, he is very brave. Harry is afraid that he will fail the test when the time comes. He will run when the battle begins. So he isn't afraid of the battle, he's afraid of being afraid. So when he learns his unit is about to be going into active duty, he resigns so he won't be afraid of being afraid when the battle comes. Get that? This is part of what Harry tells Ethne:
"All my life I have been afraid that some day I should play the coward, and from the very first I knew that I was destined for the army. I kept my fear to myself. There was no one to whom I could tell it. My mother was dead, and my father—" he stopped for a moment, with a deep intake of the breath. He could see his father, that lonely iron man, sitting at this very moment in his mother's favourite seat upon the terrace, and looking over the moonlit fields toward the Sussex Downs; he could imagine him dreaming of honours and distinctions worthy of the Fevershams to be gained immediately by his son in the Egyptian campaign. Surely that old man's stern heart would break beneath this blow. The magnitude of the bad thing which he had done, the misery which it would spread, were becoming very clear to Harry Feversham. He dropped his head between his hands and groaned aloud.
"My father," he resumed, "would, nay, could, never have understood. I know him. When danger came his way, it found him ready, but he did not foresee. That was my trouble always,—I foresaw. Any peril to be encountered, any risk to be run,—I foresaw them. I foresaw something else besides. My father would talk in his matter-of-fact way of the hours of waiting before the actual commencement of a battle, after the troops had been paraded. The mere anticipation of the suspense and the strain of those hours was a torture to me. I foresaw the possibility of cowardice. Then one evening, when my father had his old friends about him on one of his Crimean nights, two dreadful stories were told—one of an officer, the other of a surgeon, who had both shirked. I was now confronted with the fact of cowardice. I took those stories up to bed with me. They never left my memory; they became a part of me. I saw myself behaving now as one, now as the other, of those two men had behaved, perhaps in the crisis of a battle bringing ruin upon my country, certainly dishonouring my father and all the dead men whose portraits hung ranged in the hall. I tried to get the best of my fears. I hunted, but with a map of the country-side in my mind. I foresaw every hedge, every pit, every treacherous bank."
"These, too, are yours. Will you take them, please?"
She was pointing with her fan to the feathers upon the table. Feversham obediently reached out his hand, and then drew it back in surprise.
"There are four," he said.
Ethne did not reply, and looking at her fan Feversham understood. It was a fan of ivory and white feathers. She had broken off one of those feathers and added it on her own account to the three.
The thing which she had done was cruel, no doubt. But she wished to make an end—a complete, irrevocable end; though her voice was steady and her face, despite its pallor, calm, she was really tortured with humiliation and pain. All the details of Harry Feversham's courtship, the interchange of looks, the letters she had written and received, the words which had been spoken, tingled and smarted unbearably in her recollections. Their lips had touched—she recalled it with horror. She desired never to see Harry Feversham after this night. Therefore she added her fourth feather to the three.
Harry Feversham took the feathers as she bade him, without a word of remonstrance, and indeed with a sort of dignity which even at that moment surprised her. All the time, too, he had kept his eyes steadily upon hers, he had answered her questions simply, there had been nothing abject in his manner; so that Ethne already began to regret this last thing which she had done. However, it was done. Feversham had taken the four feathers.
He held them in his fingers as though he was about to tear them across. But he checked the action. He looked suddenly towards her, and kept his eyes upon her face for some little while. Then very carefully he put the feathers into his breast pocket. Ethne at this time did not consider why. She only thought that here was the irrevocable end.
And so now poor Harry is on his own. No more friends, no more Ethne, no more father, but he gets an idea and shares it with the only with Lieutenant Sutch, the only person left who seems to understand what happened. Harry tells him:
He drew his pocket-book from his breast, and took from it the four white feathers. These he laid before him on the table.
"You have kept them?" exclaimed Sutch.
"Indeed, I treasure them," said Harry, quietly. "That seems strange to you. To you they are the symbols of my disgrace. To me they are much more. They are my opportunities of retrieving it." He looked about the room, separated three of the feathers, pushed them forward a little on the tablecloth, and then leaned across toward Sutch.
"What if I could compel Trench, Castleton, and Willoughby to take back from me, each in his turn, the feather he sent? I do not say that it is likely. I do not say even that it is possible. But there is a chance that it may be possible, and I must wait upon that chance. There will be few men leading active lives as these three do who will not at some moment stand in great peril and great need. To be in readiness for that moment is from now my career. All three are in Egypt. I leave for Egypt to-morrow."
And so he goes, to try to find a way to compel each of his friends to take their feathers back, if it is possible. I would have liked the book better if we could have had it without Ethne. Two of our main characters are madly in love with her. Or just mad. She gives the first one a white feather and goes on and on after it telling us she ruined his life, then she gets engaged to his friend and on finding she doesn't love him tells us over and over she won't ruin two men's lives. That's a nice thing to say to the man you are about to marry, "no I don't love you, but I am not going to ruin two men's lives". And with that I am done writing about this book and I'm on to the next one.
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The white feather is a widely recognised propaganda symbol. It has, among other things, represented cowardice or conscientious pacifism; as in A. E. W. Mason's 1902 book, The Four Feathers. In Britain during the First World War it was often given to males out of uniform by women to shame them publicly into signing up. In the United States armed forces, however, it is used to signify extraordinary bravery and excellence in combat marksmanship.
The use of the phrase "white feather" to symbolise cowardice is attested from the late 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED cites A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), in which lexicographer Francis Grose wrote "White feather, he has a white feather, he is a coward, an allusion to a game cock, where having a white feather, is a proof he is not of the true game breed". This was in the context of cockfighting, a common entertainment in Georgian England.
At the start of World War I, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, who was a strong advocate of conscription, wanted to increase the number of those enlisting in the armed forces. Therefore he organized on 30 August 1914 a group of thirty women in his home town of Folkestone to hand out white feathers to any men that were not in uniform. Fitzgerald believed using women to shame the men into enlisting would be the most effective method of encouraging enlistment. The group that he founded (with prominent members being Emma Orczy and the prominent author Mary Augusta Ward) was known as the White Feather Brigade or the Order of the White Feather.
Although the draft would conscript both sexes, only males would be on the front lines. While the true effectiveness of the campaign is impossible to judge, it spread throughout several other nations in the empire. In Britain, it started to cause problems for the government when public servants and men in essential occupations came under pressure to enlist. That prompted Home Secretary Reginald McKenna to issue employees in state industries with lapel badges reading "King and Country" to indicate that they were serving the war effort. Likewise, the Silver War Badge, which was given to service personnel who had been honourably discharged by wounds or sickness, was first issued in September 1916 to prevent veterans from being challenged for not wearing uniform. Anecdotes from the time indicate that the campaign was unpopular among soldiers, not least because soldiers who were home on leave could find themselves presented with feathers.
One example was Private Ernest Atkins, who was on leave from the Western Front. He was riding a tram when he was presented with a white feather by a girl sitting behind him. He smacked her across the face with his pay book and said, "Certainly I'll take your feather back to the boys at Passchendaele. I'm in civvies because people think my uniform might be lousy, but if I had it on I wouldn't be half as lousy as you".
Private Norman Demuth, who had been discharged from the British Army after he had been wounded in 1916, received numerous white feathers after he returned from the Western Front. In Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Demuth is quoted as saying:
"Almost the last feather I received was on a bus. I was sitting near the door when I became aware of two women on the other side talking at me, and I thought to myself, 'Oh Lord, here we go again'. One lent forward and produced a feather and said, 'Here's a gift for a brave soldier. I took it and said,'Thank you very much- I wanted one of those.' Then I took my pipe out of my pocket and put this feather down the stem and worked it in a way I've never worked a pipe cleaner before. When it was filthy I pulled it out and said, 'You know, we didn't get these in the trenches', and handed it back to her. She instinctively put out her hand and took it, so there she was sitting with this filthy pipe cleaner in her hand and all the other people on the bus began to get indignant. Then she dropped it and got up to get out, but we were nowhere near a stopping place and the bus went on quite a long way while she got well and truly barracked by the rest of the people on the bus. I sat back and laughed like mad."
Supporters of the campaign were not easily put off. A woman who confronted a young man in a London park demanded to know why he was not in the army. "Because I am a German", he replied. He received a white feather anyway.
Occasionally injured veterans were mistakenly targeted, such as Reuben W. Farrow who after being aggressively asked by a woman on a tram why he would not do his duty, turned around and showed his missing hand causing her to apologize.
Perhaps the most misplaced use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.
Roland Gwynne, later the mayor of Eastbourne (1929–1931), received a feather from a relative. That prompted him to enlist, and he would receive the Distinguished Service Order for bravery.
The writer Compton Mackenzie, then a serving soldier, complained about the activities of the Order of the White Feather. He argued that "idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired". The pacifist Fenner Brockway said he received so many white feathers that he had enough to make a fan.
I wonder how many birds lost their lives during war just for their feathers. The black, blue, and red birds were probably happy to give their white brothers the spotlight. So, in this book Harry has received four of these feathers. Poor Harry as a boy had sat and listened to the soldiers sit around his father's table telling war stories. His father was General Feversham, and his father before that, and before that, on and on. All brave soldiers. But now he is listening to stories of men who weren't so brave:
"Lord Wilmington. One of the best names in England, if you please. Did you ever see his house in Warwickshire? Every inch of the ground you would think would have a voice to bid him play the man, if only in remembrance of his fathers.... It seemed incredible and mere camp rumour, but the rumour grew. If it was whispered at the Alma, it was spoken aloud at Inkermann, it was shouted at Balaclava. Before Sebastopol the hideous thing was proved. Wilmington was acting as galloper to his general. I believe upon my soul the general chose him for the duty, so that the fellow might set himself right. There were three hundred yards of bullet-swept flat ground, and a message to be carried across them. Had Wilmington toppled off his horse on the way, why, there were the whispers silenced for ever. Had he ridden through alive he earned distinction besides. But he didn't dare; he refused! Imagine it if you can! He sat shaking on his horse and declined. You should have seen the general. His face turned the colour of that Burgundy. 'No doubt you have a previous engagement,' he said, in the politest voice you ever heard—just that, not a word of abuse. A previous engagement on the battlefield! For the life of me, I could hardly help laughing. But it was a tragic business for Wilmington. He was broken, of course, and slunk back to London. Every house was closed to him; he dropped out of his circle like a lead bullet you let slip out of your hand into the sea. The very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke to them; and he blew his brains out in a back bedroom off the Haymarket. Curious that, eh? He hadn't the pluck to face the bullets when his name was at stake, yet he could blow his own brains out afterwards."
Lieutenant Sutch chanced to look at the clock as the story came to an end. It was now a quarter to one. Harry Feversham had still a quarter of an hour's furlough, and that quarter of an hour was occupied by a retired surgeon-general with a great wagging beard, who sat nearly opposite to the boy.
"I can tell you an incident still more curious," he said. "The man in this case had never been under fire before, but he was of my own profession. Life and death were part of his business. Nor was he really in any particular danger. The affair happened during a hill campaign in India. We were encamped in a valley, and a few Pathans used to lie out on the hillside at night and take long shots into the camp. A bullet ripped through the canvas of the hospital tent—that was all. The surgeon crept out to his own quarters, and his orderly discovered him half-an-hour afterward lying in his blood stone-dead."
"Hit?" exclaimed the major.
"Not a bit of it," said the surgeon. "He had quietly opened his instrument-case in the dark, taken out a lancet, and severed his femoral artery. Sheer panic, do you see, at the whistle of a bullet."
And listening to these stories Harry becomes afraid. But we're told he is not a coward; in fact, he is very brave. Harry is afraid that he will fail the test when the time comes. He will run when the battle begins. So he isn't afraid of the battle, he's afraid of being afraid. So when he learns his unit is about to be going into active duty, he resigns so he won't be afraid of being afraid when the battle comes. Get that? This is part of what Harry tells Ethne:
"All my life I have been afraid that some day I should play the coward, and from the very first I knew that I was destined for the army. I kept my fear to myself. There was no one to whom I could tell it. My mother was dead, and my father—" he stopped for a moment, with a deep intake of the breath. He could see his father, that lonely iron man, sitting at this very moment in his mother's favourite seat upon the terrace, and looking over the moonlit fields toward the Sussex Downs; he could imagine him dreaming of honours and distinctions worthy of the Fevershams to be gained immediately by his son in the Egyptian campaign. Surely that old man's stern heart would break beneath this blow. The magnitude of the bad thing which he had done, the misery which it would spread, were becoming very clear to Harry Feversham. He dropped his head between his hands and groaned aloud.
"My father," he resumed, "would, nay, could, never have understood. I know him. When danger came his way, it found him ready, but he did not foresee. That was my trouble always,—I foresaw. Any peril to be encountered, any risk to be run,—I foresaw them. I foresaw something else besides. My father would talk in his matter-of-fact way of the hours of waiting before the actual commencement of a battle, after the troops had been paraded. The mere anticipation of the suspense and the strain of those hours was a torture to me. I foresaw the possibility of cowardice. Then one evening, when my father had his old friends about him on one of his Crimean nights, two dreadful stories were told—one of an officer, the other of a surgeon, who had both shirked. I was now confronted with the fact of cowardice. I took those stories up to bed with me. They never left my memory; they became a part of me. I saw myself behaving now as one, now as the other, of those two men had behaved, perhaps in the crisis of a battle bringing ruin upon my country, certainly dishonouring my father and all the dead men whose portraits hung ranged in the hall. I tried to get the best of my fears. I hunted, but with a map of the country-side in my mind. I foresaw every hedge, every pit, every treacherous bank."
"These, too, are yours. Will you take them, please?"
She was pointing with her fan to the feathers upon the table. Feversham obediently reached out his hand, and then drew it back in surprise.
"There are four," he said.
Ethne did not reply, and looking at her fan Feversham understood. It was a fan of ivory and white feathers. She had broken off one of those feathers and added it on her own account to the three.
The thing which she had done was cruel, no doubt. But she wished to make an end—a complete, irrevocable end; though her voice was steady and her face, despite its pallor, calm, she was really tortured with humiliation and pain. All the details of Harry Feversham's courtship, the interchange of looks, the letters she had written and received, the words which had been spoken, tingled and smarted unbearably in her recollections. Their lips had touched—she recalled it with horror. She desired never to see Harry Feversham after this night. Therefore she added her fourth feather to the three.
Harry Feversham took the feathers as she bade him, without a word of remonstrance, and indeed with a sort of dignity which even at that moment surprised her. All the time, too, he had kept his eyes steadily upon hers, he had answered her questions simply, there had been nothing abject in his manner; so that Ethne already began to regret this last thing which she had done. However, it was done. Feversham had taken the four feathers.
He held them in his fingers as though he was about to tear them across. But he checked the action. He looked suddenly towards her, and kept his eyes upon her face for some little while. Then very carefully he put the feathers into his breast pocket. Ethne at this time did not consider why. She only thought that here was the irrevocable end.
And so now poor Harry is on his own. No more friends, no more Ethne, no more father, but he gets an idea and shares it with the only with Lieutenant Sutch, the only person left who seems to understand what happened. Harry tells him:
He drew his pocket-book from his breast, and took from it the four white feathers. These he laid before him on the table.
"You have kept them?" exclaimed Sutch.
"Indeed, I treasure them," said Harry, quietly. "That seems strange to you. To you they are the symbols of my disgrace. To me they are much more. They are my opportunities of retrieving it." He looked about the room, separated three of the feathers, pushed them forward a little on the tablecloth, and then leaned across toward Sutch.
"What if I could compel Trench, Castleton, and Willoughby to take back from me, each in his turn, the feather he sent? I do not say that it is likely. I do not say even that it is possible. But there is a chance that it may be possible, and I must wait upon that chance. There will be few men leading active lives as these three do who will not at some moment stand in great peril and great need. To be in readiness for that moment is from now my career. All three are in Egypt. I leave for Egypt to-morrow."
And so he goes, to try to find a way to compel each of his friends to take their feathers back, if it is possible. I would have liked the book better if we could have had it without Ethne. Two of our main characters are madly in love with her. Or just mad. She gives the first one a white feather and goes on and on after it telling us she ruined his life, then she gets engaged to his friend and on finding she doesn't love him tells us over and over she won't ruin two men's lives. That's a nice thing to say to the man you are about to marry, "no I don't love you, but I am not going to ruin two men's lives". And with that I am done writing about this book and I'm on to the next one.
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April 26, 2016
Part of this is my fault. I went into The Four Feathers expecting A.E.W. Mason to be the Sudan’s Joseph Conrad, but if I’d bothered to read some of the other Goodreads reviews I would have known that he is in fact it’s Jane Austen. But I’d already seen the Heath Ledger film version, so expected this to be a real adventure story about cowardice and bravery and redemption, with lots of battles and only a touch of romance - rather than reading more like an old-school British drawing room stage play, full of country estate rambles and windy speeches that talk about rather than show what little real action the story contains.
So on that point, I'll take the hit for not doing my homework. But aside from just not being what I expected, there were also what a thought were a number of technical flaws with the story as well. In places, the book will skip months and even years between chapters, but then have one long extended “scene” where a variety of things are explained in just one day (see Willoughby’s and Jack’s revelations in chapters XV-XIX) after several years of nothing happening – solely in order to move the story several leaps forward. Yet when we’re actually in the great stone prison at Omdurman where we finally hope to get the Conradian level of detail we've been waiting for, Mason takes the lazy way out with lines like “the details of their lives during the (next) six months are not to be dwelt upon.” Indeed, Harry’s entire imprisonment and escape takes only 40 pages, four pages shorter than the aforementioned single afternoon with Willoughby and Jack.
Mason has some other literary ticks as well. Perhaps it’s the age of the book (written in 1902), but in places his language comes off as comically Biblical: “For the ground was thickly covered with boulders, and the camels could seldom proceed at any pace faster than a walk. And all through the next day they lay hidden again within a ring of stones…” And in other places in his awkward retelling of the escape – which should be one of the book’s key scenes – Mason breaks the fourth wall and intrudes as the present-day storyteller, momentarily but jarringly taking the reader out of the story: “Nowadays the traveler may journey through the two hundred and forty miles of that waterless plain of coal-black rocks and yellow sand, and sleep in his berth upon the way…But in the days when Feversham and Trench escaped from Omdurman progression was not so easy a matter.”
Another annoying point is Mason's repetition. Early in the story, Mason tells us that "it was incredible to him (Harry) that he should ever have won her (Ethne);" only to tell us again just two pages later that "he watched her in a despairing amazement that he had ever had a chance of owning her." And Mason has Ethne tell us so many times that "two lives must not be spoiled because of me" that if I were Jack Durrance, I'd have rather been deaf than blind.
My favorite “Masonism,” however, lies in his goofy chapter titles, which sound more like stage cues or directors notes and include such apparently crucial details as Lieutenant Sutch is Tempted, to Lie, Durrance Sharpens His Wits, Mrs. Adair Intervenes, Ethne Makes Another Slip, Durrance Lets His Cigar Go Out, and (my favorite) Colonel Trench Assumes a Knowledge of Chemistry.
Still, if you stick with it the key ingredients of a classic story are all there, even if they take some digging to find. For today’s reader, it would have helped if Mason provided more in terms of historical context. In 1902, the English-reading public would have been intimately familiar with the details of Britain’s adventures in the Sudan, which began with the Anglo-Egyptian War in 1882 and ended with the Battle or Omdurman in 1898 – just three years before Mason’s book came out. But I doubt that many readers today would understand the background of the places and figures that are necessary to set the scene – Khartoum, Suakin, Wadi Halfa; the rise of the Mahdi and the fall of the “little general to the south,” (Charles “Chinese” Gordon). And this is both unfortunate and important, because this whole episode played a foundational role in the rise of militant Islam in the mid-1800's, and explains much of what is happening with al-Qaeda and ISIS today. Fortuitously, I am also currently reading Daniel Butler’s excellent The First Jihad: The Battle for Khartoum and the Dawn of Militant Islam, which provides all the necessary background and analysis (as well as excitement) missing in Feathers, and which I’ll review separately as soon as I’ve finished.
P.S. - I hope I'm a better judge of books than movies, because I happened to enjoy the Heath Ledger remake (41% on Rotten Tomatoes), whereas I could barely get through the 1939 version - which is more faithful to the book (IMHO not necessarily a good thing) and which scored 100%.
So on that point, I'll take the hit for not doing my homework. But aside from just not being what I expected, there were also what a thought were a number of technical flaws with the story as well. In places, the book will skip months and even years between chapters, but then have one long extended “scene” where a variety of things are explained in just one day (see Willoughby’s and Jack’s revelations in chapters XV-XIX) after several years of nothing happening – solely in order to move the story several leaps forward. Yet when we’re actually in the great stone prison at Omdurman where we finally hope to get the Conradian level of detail we've been waiting for, Mason takes the lazy way out with lines like “the details of their lives during the (next) six months are not to be dwelt upon.” Indeed, Harry’s entire imprisonment and escape takes only 40 pages, four pages shorter than the aforementioned single afternoon with Willoughby and Jack.
Mason has some other literary ticks as well. Perhaps it’s the age of the book (written in 1902), but in places his language comes off as comically Biblical: “For the ground was thickly covered with boulders, and the camels could seldom proceed at any pace faster than a walk. And all through the next day they lay hidden again within a ring of stones…” And in other places in his awkward retelling of the escape – which should be one of the book’s key scenes – Mason breaks the fourth wall and intrudes as the present-day storyteller, momentarily but jarringly taking the reader out of the story: “Nowadays the traveler may journey through the two hundred and forty miles of that waterless plain of coal-black rocks and yellow sand, and sleep in his berth upon the way…But in the days when Feversham and Trench escaped from Omdurman progression was not so easy a matter.”
Another annoying point is Mason's repetition. Early in the story, Mason tells us that "it was incredible to him (Harry) that he should ever have won her (Ethne);" only to tell us again just two pages later that "he watched her in a despairing amazement that he had ever had a chance of owning her." And Mason has Ethne tell us so many times that "two lives must not be spoiled because of me" that if I were Jack Durrance, I'd have rather been deaf than blind.
My favorite “Masonism,” however, lies in his goofy chapter titles, which sound more like stage cues or directors notes and include such apparently crucial details as Lieutenant Sutch is Tempted, to Lie, Durrance Sharpens His Wits, Mrs. Adair Intervenes, Ethne Makes Another Slip, Durrance Lets His Cigar Go Out, and (my favorite) Colonel Trench Assumes a Knowledge of Chemistry.
Still, if you stick with it the key ingredients of a classic story are all there, even if they take some digging to find. For today’s reader, it would have helped if Mason provided more in terms of historical context. In 1902, the English-reading public would have been intimately familiar with the details of Britain’s adventures in the Sudan, which began with the Anglo-Egyptian War in 1882 and ended with the Battle or Omdurman in 1898 – just three years before Mason’s book came out. But I doubt that many readers today would understand the background of the places and figures that are necessary to set the scene – Khartoum, Suakin, Wadi Halfa; the rise of the Mahdi and the fall of the “little general to the south,” (Charles “Chinese” Gordon). And this is both unfortunate and important, because this whole episode played a foundational role in the rise of militant Islam in the mid-1800's, and explains much of what is happening with al-Qaeda and ISIS today. Fortuitously, I am also currently reading Daniel Butler’s excellent The First Jihad: The Battle for Khartoum and the Dawn of Militant Islam, which provides all the necessary background and analysis (as well as excitement) missing in Feathers, and which I’ll review separately as soon as I’ve finished.
P.S. - I hope I'm a better judge of books than movies, because I happened to enjoy the Heath Ledger remake (41% on Rotten Tomatoes), whereas I could barely get through the 1939 version - which is more faithful to the book (IMHO not necessarily a good thing) and which scored 100%.
August 1, 2018
It took me a while to become invested in this novel, but I'm glad I stuck with it. The story begins in 1870 with veterans of the Crimean war seated around a table together. As they discuss their past battles, a young, sensitive boy listens to their stories and wonders if he can successfully join in the tradition of his military ancestors.
Although Harry Feversham follows in their footsteps, he has no taste for military life. When he leaves the army, he is branded as a coward and must regain his honor in the eyes of those he loves. Since it takes him six years to do that, you won't find a lot of fast-moving action in this book. But if you enjoy better-than-average writing and some good ideas to chew on (What is honor? Once lost, can it be regained? At what cost?), you'll appreciate this book, which has been the source of at least four movie adaptations.
My enjoyment of the book was greatly enhanced by the excellent narration of Ralph Cosham.
Although Harry Feversham follows in their footsteps, he has no taste for military life. When he leaves the army, he is branded as a coward and must regain his honor in the eyes of those he loves. Since it takes him six years to do that, you won't find a lot of fast-moving action in this book. But if you enjoy better-than-average writing and some good ideas to chew on (What is honor? Once lost, can it be regained? At what cost?), you'll appreciate this book, which has been the source of at least four movie adaptations.
My enjoyment of the book was greatly enhanced by the excellent narration of Ralph Cosham.
December 23, 2022
Okay, I had this book hanging around on my shelf for awhile.
I had seen the movie with Heath Ledger, loved it, one of his best performances, and I was worried about reading the book. In reality, the movie is a more adventurous and graphic representation of the book. The book follows those whom 'gifted' the feathers more. And they amongst themselves describe what happened and how they took back their feathers. While Harry Fevershem does have his perspective, it is minimal to the others.
Anyway, I'm glad to have crossed it off my list, and pull another book off my shelf. (Trying to open space for organizing.)
I had seen the movie with Heath Ledger, loved it, one of his best performances, and I was worried about reading the book. In reality, the movie is a more adventurous and graphic representation of the book. The book follows those whom 'gifted' the feathers more. And they amongst themselves describe what happened and how they took back their feathers. While Harry Fevershem does have his perspective, it is minimal to the others.
Anyway, I'm glad to have crossed it off my list, and pull another book off my shelf. (Trying to open space for organizing.)
December 5, 2017
The Four Feathers is a soap opera about honesty, bravery, honor and love during the time of Britain's war in the Sudan. There are no battle scenes but some gruesome prison camp descriptions. Most of the book is set in Britain and Ireland.
The four feathers are a symbol of cowardice, given to a young man when he resigns his army commission upon hearing about the start of military action in the Sudan. Three of the feathers come from other men in his unit, the forth from his fiancee when she learns the meaning of the other three. The book takes off as he tries to redeem himself in their eyes. There is a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication and the whole thing could have been avoided if everyone had simply been honest and brave in confronting each other at the start. However, once an Englishman's honor has been stained, all bets are off.
I can't quite put my finger on why I enjoyed the book so much. Perhaps the notion that bravery doesn't always wear a uniform struck a chord. And the love story, while immensely frustrating, is almost as suspenseful as the main character's quest for redemption.
The four feathers are a symbol of cowardice, given to a young man when he resigns his army commission upon hearing about the start of military action in the Sudan. Three of the feathers come from other men in his unit, the forth from his fiancee when she learns the meaning of the other three. The book takes off as he tries to redeem himself in their eyes. There is a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication and the whole thing could have been avoided if everyone had simply been honest and brave in confronting each other at the start. However, once an Englishman's honor has been stained, all bets are off.
I can't quite put my finger on why I enjoyed the book so much. Perhaps the notion that bravery doesn't always wear a uniform struck a chord. And the love story, while immensely frustrating, is almost as suspenseful as the main character's quest for redemption.
January 4, 2011
I just finished listening to this one (great reader, British accent) and I consider it a classic that should be compared to the likes of Dickens and Austen. Great epic story of Harry Feversham, newly engaged to beautiful Ethne Eustace and a soldier in the British army. But it's 1884 and when he receives a telegram that he's about to be shipped off to the Sudan, he makes a snap decision to give up his commission and pretend he never saw the telegram. This sets in motion the events that will shape his life; three fellow soldiers send him white feathers, the sign of cowardice, and when Ethne finds out about it she adds her own feather to make it four. Rather than let this ruin his life, Harry vows to redeem his honor. There is action, suspense, romantic entanglements (don't worry, guys, it's not icky) and the characters are people you'd want to know in real life. The movie was great, too -- I actually saw that first and it inspired me to read the book.
April 1, 2015
Torn between two stars, and three.. there should be a three and a half out there! This story was told really well, and didn't have a boring minute! But-and I hope you know what I mean-even though I liked the book, the point of the book was silly. A quest to prove he was brave, and could face danger, just because his girl is silly? Good grief man, you can do better than her! I did like Ethne, and Harry did improve for all his adventures, but.. the point of the story seemed silly, even though I liked the book! :) My favorite character's were Durrance and Sutch. Secondary characters, as usual. :D To my opinion, Durrance was a noble man! It was a good tale for all it's faults, and I did like it,(except I felt the author was unfair to Durrance), so don't let me be a wet blanket if you want to read it, because you will find it enjoyable. :)
June 13, 2013
As my first book finished in quite a while, I feel quite honored to have read this thrilling, yuppish story of courage. If you like the yuppie 80s (1880s) and the exciting thrills from conversations of war stories and exploring of new lands you will love this story.
April 1, 2015
The end makes the whole story so satisfying. A few truths are portrayed well too. I loved the blend of adventure, romance, and poignant expression of the inward turmoil of the heroes (and heroine). And yes...This was so much better than the movie (Heath Ledger version at least)!
May 26, 2019
Let's see if I can get this straight. Harry Feversham is an officer in the army, but he quits his commission to avoid being shipped off to fight in Egypt. His three army "friends," Trench, Castleton, and Willoughby each send him a white feather as an accusation of cowardice. The feathers arrive just before his engagement party to Ethne Eustace, who promptly dumps him and adds her own fourth feather. There are two other key characters in all this: Lieutenant Sutch, a friend of Feversham's father who becomes his confidant, and Captain Durrance, Feversham's former best friend, who is romantically interested in Ethne.
Despite the accusations against him, Feversham turns out to be no coward. He goes to extraordinary lengths throughout the novel to performs feats that will convince his accusers to take back their feathers, with an eye to resuming his relationship with Ethne. While all this is happening, Durrance is blinded accidentally while in the desert, but makes his overtures to Ethne, and is accepted, even though she is still in love with Feversham. Of course she is.
For me, there was not a lot to like about the plot of The Four Feathers. It reminded me somewhat of The Count of Monte Cristo, insofar as the main characters sets up a ridiculous quest for himself that is all about measuring himself by other people's standards, rather than what he wants. I wanted to shake him and just say: forget those three assholes, they weren't your real friends! Forget Ethne, if she really loved you she would never have given you the feather without thinking deeply about what she was giving up!
Nonetheless, as much as I loathed the plot, I think Mason's novel is generally well-written and captures the prevailing values of his time. They are awful, fucked-up values, but it is always important to understand from where modern culture has originated. I would love to see a parody of this story, it could be great.
Despite the accusations against him, Feversham turns out to be no coward. He goes to extraordinary lengths throughout the novel to performs feats that will convince his accusers to take back their feathers, with an eye to resuming his relationship with Ethne. While all this is happening, Durrance is blinded accidentally while in the desert, but makes his overtures to Ethne, and is accepted, even though she is still in love with Feversham. Of course she is.
For me, there was not a lot to like about the plot of The Four Feathers. It reminded me somewhat of The Count of Monte Cristo, insofar as the main characters sets up a ridiculous quest for himself that is all about measuring himself by other people's standards, rather than what he wants. I wanted to shake him and just say: forget those three assholes, they weren't your real friends! Forget Ethne, if she really loved you she would never have given you the feather without thinking deeply about what she was giving up!
Nonetheless, as much as I loathed the plot, I think Mason's novel is generally well-written and captures the prevailing values of his time. They are awful, fucked-up values, but it is always important to understand from where modern culture has originated. I would love to see a parody of this story, it could be great.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 30, 2018
The Four Feathers, based on the novel by AEW Mason
Eight out of 10
The main character of this formidable motion picture is a very peculiar, valiant, intriguing young man – Harry Feversham.
Alas, we can say that about the fabulous, late actor that portrays him – extremely talented, but difficult to understand and bent on provocative, self-destructive behavior.
The hero is an officer in the British Army, in 1884, and he is enthusiastic about his relationship with Ethne Eustace aka Kate Hudson.
He confesses to her that he has gone out of the Army and all he cares about is his love for his would be wife.
As he tries to explain further his decision, the fact that they were about to be sent abroad and he did not want that, in fact, he only joined the army for his military father, a message come for him.
In the envelope received in a church, there is a message from his friends, colleagues in the same regiment…
There are Four Feathers!
These symbolize cowardice and the decision of the hero to avoid fighting is punished in this way.
When asked by another very strong, important personage about his presence in the desert and the reason why he had abandoned the British officer corps, the hero says it was mostly fear…
The Four Feathers have a traumatic, tremendous effect on the protagonist who would act in an astonishing manner.
Whereas he had refused to travel in an organized, much easier fashion to the Sudan, on the front, he now takes extreme pains to reach the same destination.
He pays a supposed guide to take him to the British forces fighting an insurgency of the Mahdi – was this the name of the rebellious tribes (?)
That man proves soon to be a vicious racist who beats and abuses an African woman that he deems as inferior to him as to allow him all manner of insults and then blows and disgusting behavior.
One may be tempted to say that fortunately this villain pays for it, albeit the ultimate price might be too much.
This is the moment when the hero joins Abou Fatma, a warrior of great skill, stature, pride, fidelity and valor, who is puzzled by the presence of this English in the middle of the desert and his quest for his own troops.
The British forces hire Fatma and Feversham, although they have no idea that the latter is not a native man.
Abou Fatma soon kills another man who had insulted him and he is taken prisoner by the Mahdi, who had occupied a camp of the British, took their uniforms and hanged and killed many.
The hero asks Abou, his new friend and ally, to travel to his friends and alert them on the imminent danger.
Instead of showing his gratitude, taking precautions and preventive measures, the commander of the forces, Tom Willoughby – one of the Four Feathers initiators – orders the torture of the messenger.
While Abou is whipped, the Mahdi attacks, then they pretend they retreat, causing the enemy to send a force of cavalry, only to fall into a first trap and then the tribes attack again.
They are dressed in the uniforms they had taken from those they had killed already and so make the English think they have allies to the rescue.
Castleton – another “Feather” – is killed, while William Trench – Feather three -aka Michael Sheen is taken prisoner.
Jack Durrnace is the last feather aka Wes Bentley and he is blinded by own defective rifle and is shipped home.
In a super human act of valor which makes one wonder as to why did he refuse to fight ion the first place, Harry Feversham decides to walk into the enemy camp and get into prison to be with his Feather Comrade!
The Four Feathers is a surprising drama; with a protagonist that starts by running away from the war, only to make incredible decisions later, showing a courage that make him…Superman.
Eight out of 10
The main character of this formidable motion picture is a very peculiar, valiant, intriguing young man – Harry Feversham.
Alas, we can say that about the fabulous, late actor that portrays him – extremely talented, but difficult to understand and bent on provocative, self-destructive behavior.
The hero is an officer in the British Army, in 1884, and he is enthusiastic about his relationship with Ethne Eustace aka Kate Hudson.
He confesses to her that he has gone out of the Army and all he cares about is his love for his would be wife.
As he tries to explain further his decision, the fact that they were about to be sent abroad and he did not want that, in fact, he only joined the army for his military father, a message come for him.
In the envelope received in a church, there is a message from his friends, colleagues in the same regiment…
There are Four Feathers!
These symbolize cowardice and the decision of the hero to avoid fighting is punished in this way.
When asked by another very strong, important personage about his presence in the desert and the reason why he had abandoned the British officer corps, the hero says it was mostly fear…
The Four Feathers have a traumatic, tremendous effect on the protagonist who would act in an astonishing manner.
Whereas he had refused to travel in an organized, much easier fashion to the Sudan, on the front, he now takes extreme pains to reach the same destination.
He pays a supposed guide to take him to the British forces fighting an insurgency of the Mahdi – was this the name of the rebellious tribes (?)
That man proves soon to be a vicious racist who beats and abuses an African woman that he deems as inferior to him as to allow him all manner of insults and then blows and disgusting behavior.
One may be tempted to say that fortunately this villain pays for it, albeit the ultimate price might be too much.
This is the moment when the hero joins Abou Fatma, a warrior of great skill, stature, pride, fidelity and valor, who is puzzled by the presence of this English in the middle of the desert and his quest for his own troops.
The British forces hire Fatma and Feversham, although they have no idea that the latter is not a native man.
Abou Fatma soon kills another man who had insulted him and he is taken prisoner by the Mahdi, who had occupied a camp of the British, took their uniforms and hanged and killed many.
The hero asks Abou, his new friend and ally, to travel to his friends and alert them on the imminent danger.
Instead of showing his gratitude, taking precautions and preventive measures, the commander of the forces, Tom Willoughby – one of the Four Feathers initiators – orders the torture of the messenger.
While Abou is whipped, the Mahdi attacks, then they pretend they retreat, causing the enemy to send a force of cavalry, only to fall into a first trap and then the tribes attack again.
They are dressed in the uniforms they had taken from those they had killed already and so make the English think they have allies to the rescue.
Castleton – another “Feather” – is killed, while William Trench – Feather three -aka Michael Sheen is taken prisoner.
Jack Durrnace is the last feather aka Wes Bentley and he is blinded by own defective rifle and is shipped home.
In a super human act of valor which makes one wonder as to why did he refuse to fight ion the first place, Harry Feversham decides to walk into the enemy camp and get into prison to be with his Feather Comrade!
The Four Feathers is a surprising drama; with a protagonist that starts by running away from the war, only to make incredible decisions later, showing a courage that make him…Superman.
March 20, 2020
When I give a book like The Four Feathers ** what I mean is "𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘐 𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘴"
I was hoping for an imperialist gentleman's John Wick with accused coward Harry Feversham avenging his honor by mowing down Mahdist warriors in 1880's Sudan. Instead...
Look, I am sure Ethne Eustace means well and all but she's the goddamn worst. First off, she piggybacks on Harry's shame when his closest comrades send him 3 white feathers symbolizing cowardice for quitting the service rather than head out to Sudan with the rest of the unit. She has no real reason to be upset that Harry decided not to follow his genealogical lineage of soldiery. She has even LESS right to present her own feather of cowardice considering she does nothing other than play one song on the violin and hang out in Ireland.
Secondly, when Harry loses his grip with reality and heads to Sudan to prove his bravery and win back the only eligible woman in the UK (I guess) Ethne wallows in pity and agrees to marry Harry's friend and fellow soldier Durrance even though she only wants to friendzone him. To be fair to Ethne she does tell him he's been friendzoned but leaves the door open for continued correspondence (which of course means Durrance will still be in love with her).
Speaking of Durrance, he's probably the best character in the book as he's presented as a Sudan loving soldier of fortune who has a thing for Ethne. He's rendered blind in the desert from sunstroke and kind of turns into a budding super villain, but Mason doesn't pull the trigger on it.
The action that I am seeking is sadly lacking - Harry redeems his first feather (through a story told 2nd hand by Willoughby) by retrieving General Charles George Gordon's lost letters in ruined Khartoum. I was hoping there would be more to the story than a simple package quest. I wanted a scene where Harry beats Willoughby with the letter packet screaming at him to take back the feather, but what can you do?
We learn that Castleton is dead so the second the feather is invalidated by default which is pretty lame.
Then he earns Trench's feather (#3) by allowing himself to get captured in Omdurman and breaking out of prison with his pal. The prison break is told as boringly as possible, and Mason deliberately calls out he won't spend much time discussing the horrors of the prison (much to this reader's annoyance)
Anyway, back to Ethne, she's engaged to Durrance and can't keep any secrets away from him because SHE IS SO BAD AT LYING. Durrance realizes she's not into him and WHILE BLIND figures out the entire plot of the book and SOLVES THE PROBLEM on his own. He even heals the damage done between Harry and his stiff upper lip father FOR HIM. Aside from his gun fetish, Durrance is a swell guy.
So Ethne meets with Harry finally and their hearts go a pitter patter but she sends him away because SHE FEELS PITY FOR THE BLIND MAN THAT CLEARLY CREEPS HER OUT WITH HIS MIND POWERS. At least she gives up THE LAST FEATHER so Harry's quest is complete. Durrance, ONCE AGAIN, has to solve everyone else's problems for them and he flat out tells Ethne that he won't let her ruin 3 people's lives (including her own) because she's clearly an idiot.
So Harry redeems himself (yay second chances), hooks back up with his Irish lass, Durrance heads back out to Africa where he felt free, and this book mercifully ends.
---------------------------------------------------------------
+* For sparking my interest in the Madhist Wars in Sudan
+* For Durrance
- * for a lack of action IN AN ADVENTURE NOVEL
- ** for the lackluster romance between Harry and Ethne
I was hoping for an imperialist gentleman's John Wick with accused coward Harry Feversham avenging his honor by mowing down Mahdist warriors in 1880's Sudan. Instead...
Look, I am sure Ethne Eustace means well and all but she's the goddamn worst. First off, she piggybacks on Harry's shame when his closest comrades send him 3 white feathers symbolizing cowardice for quitting the service rather than head out to Sudan with the rest of the unit. She has no real reason to be upset that Harry decided not to follow his genealogical lineage of soldiery. She has even LESS right to present her own feather of cowardice considering she does nothing other than play one song on the violin and hang out in Ireland.
Secondly, when Harry loses his grip with reality and heads to Sudan to prove his bravery and win back the only eligible woman in the UK (I guess) Ethne wallows in pity and agrees to marry Harry's friend and fellow soldier Durrance even though she only wants to friendzone him. To be fair to Ethne she does tell him he's been friendzoned but leaves the door open for continued correspondence (which of course means Durrance will still be in love with her).
Speaking of Durrance, he's probably the best character in the book as he's presented as a Sudan loving soldier of fortune who has a thing for Ethne. He's rendered blind in the desert from sunstroke and kind of turns into a budding super villain, but Mason doesn't pull the trigger on it.
The action that I am seeking is sadly lacking - Harry redeems his first feather (through a story told 2nd hand by Willoughby) by retrieving General Charles George Gordon's lost letters in ruined Khartoum. I was hoping there would be more to the story than a simple package quest. I wanted a scene where Harry beats Willoughby with the letter packet screaming at him to take back the feather, but what can you do?
We learn that Castleton is dead so the second the feather is invalidated by default which is pretty lame.
Then he earns Trench's feather (#3) by allowing himself to get captured in Omdurman and breaking out of prison with his pal. The prison break is told as boringly as possible, and Mason deliberately calls out he won't spend much time discussing the horrors of the prison (much to this reader's annoyance)
Anyway, back to Ethne, she's engaged to Durrance and can't keep any secrets away from him because SHE IS SO BAD AT LYING. Durrance realizes she's not into him and WHILE BLIND figures out the entire plot of the book and SOLVES THE PROBLEM on his own. He even heals the damage done between Harry and his stiff upper lip father FOR HIM. Aside from his gun fetish, Durrance is a swell guy.
So Ethne meets with Harry finally and their hearts go a pitter patter but she sends him away because SHE FEELS PITY FOR THE BLIND MAN THAT CLEARLY CREEPS HER OUT WITH HIS MIND POWERS. At least she gives up THE LAST FEATHER so Harry's quest is complete. Durrance, ONCE AGAIN, has to solve everyone else's problems for them and he flat out tells Ethne that he won't let her ruin 3 people's lives (including her own) because she's clearly an idiot.
So Harry redeems himself (yay second chances), hooks back up with his Irish lass, Durrance heads back out to Africa where he felt free, and this book mercifully ends.
---------------------------------------------------------------
+* For sparking my interest in the Madhist Wars in Sudan
+* For Durrance
- * for a lack of action IN AN ADVENTURE NOVEL
- ** for the lackluster romance between Harry and Ethne
August 4, 2011
Gorgeous. I remember loving the 2002 film when it came out so decided to read this. I'm glad that it has been years and years since I've seen the movie since I was able to come at this piece with only the premise in mind: the rest was an empty canvass waiting for Mason's images and emotions.
Harry Feversham, Ethne Eustace, and Jack Durrance are characters that live within a code and structure of honor that I think is a bit lost on a modern audience. Not that we can't understand its core principles, but we can never really understand the depth and pervasiveness of these structures in Victorian England. As a modern reader I found myself at one instant glowing with pride at the motives and gestures of the characters, at the next I wanted to shake them with frustration. Isn't that a glorious reaction for any author to evoke?
I expected the story to be told more from Harry's perspective (due to the film's perspective, no doubt), but found that the constant focus on the other characters made his quest to redeem the dishonor of the four feathers seem more powerful: it leave so much of that struggle to the reader's imagination which allows me to participate in the work and to paint those struggles in tints that illustrate what I myself would think of as the worst fate for a "pariah" as the book calls Harry. That said, I also thought Mason's descriptions of the House of Stone were some of the most psychologically terrifying ideas possible as he illustrated the torment of Harry and Trench.
I loved the Empire critique/commentary laced throughout the piece. When Mason wrote it, he could perhaps see flaws in imperialism though he did not dwell on them. Sometimes he even reveled in the glory of the Empire. It is the distance of over 100 years that allows me to love this work in a new context. As I mentioned before, gorgeous.
Harry Feversham, Ethne Eustace, and Jack Durrance are characters that live within a code and structure of honor that I think is a bit lost on a modern audience. Not that we can't understand its core principles, but we can never really understand the depth and pervasiveness of these structures in Victorian England. As a modern reader I found myself at one instant glowing with pride at the motives and gestures of the characters, at the next I wanted to shake them with frustration. Isn't that a glorious reaction for any author to evoke?
I expected the story to be told more from Harry's perspective (due to the film's perspective, no doubt), but found that the constant focus on the other characters made his quest to redeem the dishonor of the four feathers seem more powerful: it leave so much of that struggle to the reader's imagination which allows me to participate in the work and to paint those struggles in tints that illustrate what I myself would think of as the worst fate for a "pariah" as the book calls Harry. That said, I also thought Mason's descriptions of the House of Stone were some of the most psychologically terrifying ideas possible as he illustrated the torment of Harry and Trench.
I loved the Empire critique/commentary laced throughout the piece. When Mason wrote it, he could perhaps see flaws in imperialism though he did not dwell on them. Sometimes he even reveled in the glory of the Empire. It is the distance of over 100 years that allows me to love this work in a new context. As I mentioned before, gorgeous.
April 29, 2012
Before I start, let me just say that the general review for the book is, I think, more a description of the Hollywood movies.
Written at the turn of the 20th century, this novel of British Empire is not exactly run of the mill. I enjoyed the adventure of the tale, but was surprised by the insights into human nature that were given. It was not all "fight for honor, queen, and country" (although that was definitely a subtext) but also focused on human relationships, their successes, and their failures.
I was particularly intrigued by the element of human nature that Mason termed "imagination" in the novel that some characters (living and dead) possessed and others didn't, and which seemed to be a determining factor in their success or failure at particular tasks in relationship to each other and to different aspects of society.
There is something that I would like to see: as usual, the "native" characters in the book, while praised in limited ways, were left hanging at the end. I would love to see an alternate version of the tale, set in the same universe, but from the point of view of both the allies and the enemies of the English at the time in North Africa. Does such a work already exist?
And I was disappointed in the ending, a bit. It ended nicely! Don't fret. I was just hoping for a more self-actualized main character in the end . After all, if I had been through what he had been through for six years, I don't think I could have "come home again". But I live in a different time and culture.
Written at the turn of the 20th century, this novel of British Empire is not exactly run of the mill. I enjoyed the adventure of the tale, but was surprised by the insights into human nature that were given. It was not all "fight for honor, queen, and country" (although that was definitely a subtext) but also focused on human relationships, their successes, and their failures.
I was particularly intrigued by the element of human nature that Mason termed "imagination" in the novel that some characters (living and dead) possessed and others didn't, and which seemed to be a determining factor in their success or failure at particular tasks in relationship to each other and to different aspects of society.
There is something that I would like to see: as usual, the "native" characters in the book, while praised in limited ways, were left hanging at the end. I would love to see an alternate version of the tale, set in the same universe, but from the point of view of both the allies and the enemies of the English at the time in North Africa. Does such a work already exist?
And I was disappointed in the ending, a bit. It ended nicely! Don't fret. I was just hoping for a more self-actualized main character in the end . After all, if I had been through what he had been through for six years, I don't think I could have "come home again". But I live in a different time and culture.
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