Anne's Reviews > Basil

” It is strange how frequently that instinctive belief in omens and predestinations, which we flippantly term Superstition, asserts its natural prerogative even over minds trained to repel it, at the moment of some great event in our lives.”

Basil is an 1852 tragic romance that concerns a son, Basil, whose father is obsessed with social classes and forbids the son to marry below his station. The tragic part comes when the son falls in love with a line draper’s daughter. It’s a story with themes of love, deceit, betrayal, revenge, class conflict, and family devotion.

If you are familiar with Wilkie Collins by way of his best-known novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone – both of which were forerunners of the detective and police procedural genre – know that Basil is not a mystery or crime novel per se. Nonetheless, it does possess a villain hellbent on revenge. While this is an early work of the author, the writing is no less engaging than the titles mentioned though it is quite different than what I have come to associate as a typical WC book.

The story opens and closes with Basil writing his autobiography. It utilizes firsthand accounts of the events along with letters obtained and transcribed later. It reminded me of modern novels of late that recreated a story using a multimedia approach (pod casts, interviews, diary, etc.).

I started by reading an eBook but switched to an audio read by Nicholas Boulton. I most definitely recommend the audio. Boulton’s performance is excellent and added the emotion (anguish, torment, rage, fear) to the narrator’s voice that greatly enhances the novel.

While this is a solid novel worth reading, it does not reach the level that his later works, his best know works, do. The flaw in this plot is that the chance of it borders on unrealistic. That and some of the letters read in the text make for slow pacing. If you are new to Collins, start with the better know novels and work your way back here.