Books and movies about sports are abundant, and tend to follow a certain pattern: hero (or more rarely heroine) is unusually talented, faces hurdles, is set back at some point, but eventually triumphs over adversity, winning trophies and learning (and implicitly teaching us) lifeskills along the way. Books and movies about more cerebral pursuits such as chess and bridge are harder to pull off, lacking the obvious visual imagery of physical sports. It is therefore even more impressive that The Queen’s Gambit is a thoroughly enjoyable, occasionally intense, quite original novel, with a strong female protagonist.
The first third of the novel is set in 1960s Kentucky, when 8-year-old Beth Harmon is orphaned by a car accident and ends up in Methuen, an orphanage run by the formidable Mrs Deardorff. All the children are fed a daily tranquilizer to ‘even their dispositions’; that practice was legal at the time. Beth learns to save her ‘green pills’ to allow her to sleep at night and ends up addicted to the pills. Whipping is also a routine punishment, and there is sexual abuse by older children.
Quite by chance, the eight-year-old girl happens upon the janitor playing chess by himself in the basement, and is instantly riveted. Beth is mathematically gifted, has an astonishing memory and has the chess-player’s ability to see many moves ahead. Lying in bed at night:
She [] made the chessboard on the ceiling and played over all her games with Mr Shaibel, one at a time.
Startled by her innate talent, Mr Schaibel brings in the high school chess coach to play Beth, which results in an invitation to play all twelve members of the chess club simultaneously. Until now, Beth’s talent has been secret, but this invitation brings it to the attention of Mrs Deardorff, who luckily sees it as a PR exercise for the orphanage. The high school is intimidating:
Abruptly she saw herself as a small unimportant person — a plain, brown-haired orphan girl in dull institutional clothes. She was half the size of these easy, insolent students with their loud voices and bright sweaters. She felt powerless and silly. But then she looked at the boards again […] She might be out of place in this high school, but she was not out of place with those twelve chessboards.
Predictably, Beth wins all the simultaneous games and seems poised for greater triumphs as a 9-year-old prodigy, but her tranquilizer addiction leads to a devastating incident.
Mrs Deardorff smiled grimly. “No more chess.”
Three long chess-less years follow, and the reader mourns for Beth’s wasted talent. Unexpectedly, before she turns 13, she is adopted by the Wheatleys, and immediately looks for a way to play chess again. A local tournament nets her $100 and some publicity, and when Mrs Wheatley finds herself virtually destitute, Beth’s chess becomes the road to financial stability. (A more predictable plot would have had Mrs Wheatley exploit Beth’s talent and waste the money, but in this book she is kind and supportive, although alcoholic)
Beth Harmon is a remarkable character. She is not necessarily ‘relatable’ — the word often used to indicate a protagonist who shows the vulnerability and self-consciousness of most of us. Instead, she is distinctively herself: focused, determined, unapologetic. She is never embarrassed or tentative about her astonishing abilities, and never feels the need to downplay them in false humility to make herself more likeable. As she reaches her late teens, she discovers sex, and is pleasantly matter-of-fact about its pleasures, as are her male chess-playing partners.
For chess lovers, there are plenty of games described in the book.
Beltik could have made the pin, and then his queen knight became a threat. She had to break the pin and then protect against a fork with that damned knight, and after that he had a rook threat, and bingo, there went her pawn.
For those who are left cold by the paragraph above, it’s easy enough to skip over the details and just enjoy the story.
The male chess players Beth encounters along her journey are well drawn: each with their own personality, fiercely competitive but sometimes supportive to an extent. Beth’s one friend, Jolene, is the only black character in the book, and less well developed: the author seems to have used Jolene as a convenient support when Beth is in need.
The chess world is excellently portrayed — its intensity, lack of gender or racial diversity, the ‘chess bums’, the conversations.
Everyone looked at her. She heard someone whisper “Thirteen fucking years old,” and immediately the thought came into her mind [..]: I could have done this at eight.
Yet, in modern America, chess is small potatoes.
They were the highest-ranked players in the country, assembled here in a single room, but it had the feel of a high school tournament. If it were golf or tennis, Benny Watts and she would be surrounded by reporters, would be playing under something other than these fluorescent lights and on plastic boards with cheap plastic pieces, watched by a few polite middle-aged people with nothing better to do.
It’s different in Russia, where chess is really a celebrity sport. Young players are groomed and supported by the state chess system. At Moscow immigration:
when she finally got to the head of the line, the woman said “The chess champion!” and smiled broadly at her. [..] The woman was, of course, Russian. No official in America would have recognized Beth’s name.
Beth draws media attention in America, but the celebrity is heavily tinged by her gender. She is disappointed that an article in Life magazine does not include her thoughts about chess, or about how she “plays the Sicilian [defense]”
“But Beth,” Mrs Wheatley said, “it makes you a celebrity!”
Beth looked at her thoughtfully. “For being a girl, mostly,” she said.
By her late teens, Beth is on her own, and “is too old to be called a prodigy.” She is in the big leagues now: competing to be US champion, and then invited to tournaments abroad where she is faced with the fearsome Russian players. The final tournament in the novel, described over the last 50 pages, is tense and thrilling.
This novel is a good read, but the writing can be a little flat. The events and plot development are quite enough to hold the reader’s attention, and the tone of the writing may be intended to reflect Beth’s own inner monologue. But her reactions seem a little odd at times: for example, she is far more devastated by the death of Mr Schaibel (the janitor who started her chess journey) than Mrs Wheatley (the adoptive mother who Beth liked and who encouraged and enabled her chess for years). The TV series starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth avoids these stumbles, because Taylor-Joy is wonderful, adding subtle layers of understanding to Beth’s intense personality. Both book and series are good, but this is the rare case where the TV series is just slightly better.
* The title of this review is from a poem by W.B. Yeats, Long-legged Fly, that is in the foreward of the novel.
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