The Riddle Of The Sands

By: Erskine Childers

Narrated by: Anton Lesser

Riddle of the Sands is set during the long suspicious years leading up to the First World War and is a classic of spy fiction.©2008 BBC Audiobooks Ltd (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Stirring Schoolboy Adventure

Despite my seemingly derogatory title, this is very good and well narrated. Highly recommend! Also recommend the 70s film starring Michael York of the same title.

Brilliant story,beautifully read

This wonderful book deserves Anton Lesser as narrator. It’s a fast-paced adventure that draws the reader/listener in and is hard to break away from.
The narration is excellent. Lesser makes the characters come to life.
Superb.

historical accuracy

Slow start, characters are developed nicely over time. Very fast pace towards the end. Narrator does an excellent job of acting out various characters.

A 19th Century Classic

By modern standards, this story unfolds very, very slowly. It is realistic and quite believable.

The performance is perfect. Anton Lesser is masterful.

Terrific narrator with excellent writing

It simply moved too slowly to hold my interest. I suspect that someone with sailing experience would find it more engaging. The writing is superior and perhaps I will return to give it another read/listen

Beware the casual racism of 1903, otherwise great

This is an interesting book, with a fascinating premise: that Germany could use its Frisian Islands militarily against Britain.

It’s very technical with regard to nautical terminology and details, which aren’t my thing so I just let them flow past while my hands did other things. So it was good for multitasking.

I am interested in geography, so I kept bringing up maps to orient myself to where they were. Again, there’s a lot of detail.

I’m left wondering if publishing this novel acted as a deterrent to trying an attack of the type described here during WWI.

The narrative character started out as a drawling pain in the rear. Thankfully, the drawling and complaining didn’t continue into the second half of the book.

Interesting look back at espionage prior to WWI, and a kind of historical futurism. Just be aware that the British habit of casually stated racial superiority is on full display, as is the pro-colonialism perspective of the day.

Keeps One Awake

This is an excellent early example of spy fiction, and a prescriptive example of predictive literature given its focus on a German dream of invading Britain a decade before WW1. The Riddle of the Sands is a listen you want to get to the end of, even if you are not a Yachting enthusiast.

Deserves its reputation as one of the greatest spy novels

The sands of the title refer to the coastal sands of Germany, it’s 1900 or so, and I won’t say anything beyond that for fear of giving away too much. The narration is one of the finest I’ve encountered here, in the cultured accents called for by the characters, although I had to slow down the playback slightly to avoid missing anything.

Slow beginning, but worth the wait

It takes awhile for this story to get going, but it becomes gripping later. Anton Lesser's reading is, as always, magnificent. This is a classic thriller - no gory stuff, and more of a mental cat-and-mouse game than an action adventure. There is a lot of sailing terminology, but it is not essential to understand the jargon (I didn't understand most of it) to enjoy the book.

If you can sail a boat, this might be great

If someone is an expert sailor, "The Riddle of the Sands" might be just the thing. But I am not a sailor and do not really know much about sailing. Port and starboard are about the extent of my knowledge. So for me this was a real slog - it seemed to go on forever with endless descriptions of activities on board the vessel and the various types of tides, currents and sand bars encountered. There is a story of friendship and a romance buried in there somewhere. The reader is first rate. But the two main characters remained remote and inaccessible to me and the paranoid plot did not make a lot of sense. In fact, teasing out what that paranoid plot actually is takes up the main part of the story. Apparently, at the time of its writing in 1903, Great Britain was concerned about the possibility of a land invasion mounted by sea. And at the time, this book stirred a lot of public debate. While the prose is intelligent, the notion of a hidden fleet in this age of satellite imagery, nukes and drones seems rather quaint. In short, it is not very relevant today; it may have reached its expiry date.