By D.E. Stevenson
When you’re very young you take people as you find them. It’s only when you’ve had experience that you begin to measure and weigh.
After reluctantly quitting Crooked Adam after about 3 hours of listening to it, I turned to this book. I immediately settled into the feelings of joy and peace and comfort that I look for in D.E. Stevenson and that Crooked Adam was not giving me. It felt like I was coming home again. I chose this one of all the ones that I have waiting for me on Audible because it is often cited as a favorite despite the unusual, for DES, choice as a male main character, and in first person, to boot. The narration by David Monteath was perfection.
David tells his story starting from when he was a little boy living with his wonderful parents at the vicarage. He starts out each phase of his life with the views he sees through one of the windows he looks out from at each residence he moves to as he grows up. After the rural manse in Haines, he moves in with his Uncle William in Edinburgh to complete his schooling. He starts his working life as a lowly clerk in a law office where he lives in a dingy and depressing boarding house filled with foolish and unhappy people. He escapes from there to a much more copacetic environment in a room above a book shop that he is able to afford due to his growing success as a writer. The fifth window we will remain silent on, but his life through the last window we are introduced to follows a bell shaped curve, with his childhood in Haines and his home at the end being the epitome of happiness, and the time in the boarding house being rock bottom.
Along the way, we become acquainted with the many people who enter David’s life and have an influence on him. David is gentle, kind, and trusting of others, and, at first, more than a little naive, due to his upbringing in Haines. The fellow boarders in the seedy London boarding house provide him with quite the education in the ways of the world as in one way or another they take advantage of his good nature. At one point, I thought he was going to get into an Of Human Bondage situation with one of the residents. But David is no dummy, and he shows himself very capable of putting his foot down, which made very satisfying reading on more than one occasion. Everyone we meet has something to teach him for good or ill. Some situations David encounters are rather dire, but his gentle sense of humor and inner strength of character always see him through. Many of the people we meet are happy allies. Particularly worth mentioning are Barbie and Nell who have their own story in The Tall Stranger. It is through them that he becomes reacquainted with a childhood friend who becomes his romantic interest. She is enmeshed in a trap that she is too softhearted and easily manipulated to escape from, but for the the help of David, Barbie, Nell, and his shining star of a mother, a sad future is avoided.
Well into the book, David becomes quite a success as an author of both fiction and non-fiction. In coming to the end of Five Windows, I felt like I had just finished one of his books. No wonder he was such a successful author.