This long, shaggy Victorian novel centres on a classic love-triangle plot: the cousins Philip and Peter, poor relatives of a distinguished Manx landowning family, are boyhood friends. Charitable relatives fix up for Philip to go to school and train for the Manx bar, doors that are closed to the illegitimate Pete; he grows up to become a semi-literate fisherman. But the boys remain close, and when Pete decides to join the Kimberley diamond rush to try to earn enough to satisfy the father of his intended bride, Kate, he charges Philip with the responsibility of looking after her until he gets back.

The inevitable happens, ambitious Kate falls for the dashing young law student, and when false news of Pete's death arrives the two of them take an ill-advised roll in the hay after the Melliah (harvest dinner). Pete turns up alive shortly afterwards, and Kate finds herself pressured into going through with the planned marriage after all. Needless to say, there is no good way out of this situation, and things rapidly get worse...

I started reading this book with the hope that I would find that Caine had been unfairly neglected, as happens to so many hugely popular authors after their deaths. But, whilst it's easy to see why he was so successful, it's also hard to make a case for reviving him, at least on the evidence of this book.

He's a wonderfully fluent, easy-to-read writer, his prose doesn't have any of that late-Victorian stiffness or Edwardian archness that often plagues books from the turn of the century. And he has an obvious gift for lively, funny, original dialogue: the Manx dialect and syntax are never allowed to get in the way of intelligibility. The book is full of quaint local colour, from rustic inns and agricultural customs to the pageantry of Tynwald Day (Caine is credited with founding the Manx tourist industry), and there are plenty of comic incidents, many of them centering around Kate's father, Caesar, who somehow manages to combine the roles of miller, publican and evangelical preacher.

On the other hand, Caine never refuses an opportunity to throw in a melodramatic incident or a moralistic cliché. The timeline makes no sense at all: Philip goes through his entire career from pupillage to being a respected senior judge in the time it takes his putative daughter to get from conception to first steps. The characters consistently act in ways that are — at best — implausible in psychological and narrative terms, and Caine is clearly not the kind of writer to fuss himself about piddling little details like calendars, wind-and-tide, legal procedures, inheritance customs, etc. The closing scene, while spectacular, is one that would have a hard time being taken seriously even on the stage of an opera house. In a novel it comes over as pure fantasy: this is not the Manx Tess so much as the Manx Iolanthe... ( )