Tall stories
Benny Green
The partition of antiquity, or the great Old Rush as it is known among publishers 9f children's fiction, is a thriving business In which rivalries are keenly pursued. Among the most successful and prolific of the prospectors is Henry Treece, who Writes about people with names like Glug and Baldnose, and who ranks second only to the brilliant Rosemary Sutcliff as a developer of ancient themes peopled with the ghosts of English history. In Swords frotn the North (Puffin 75p), he runs the risk, as usual, of inviting the ribaldry of irreverent juveniles by calling his hero Harald Hardrada the Bear of Norway; One is reminded of the row between Mor ris and Rossetti when Rossetti admitted his inability to care much about a hero with a dragon as a brother-in-law, to which Morris responded spiritedly that a. dragon was better than a bloody fool.
Treece's Hardrada is a bear only figuratively speaking, whose stoic virtues are strongly contrasted with the nasty Bysantine lowlives with whom he becomes involved. The text is a shade demanding at times for. the 11-year-olds for whom it is recommended, but Treece slips in the occasional remark like 'We all learn better as we get older', which ought to encourage the naive. The most delicately-handled thread of the plot is the one involving Hardrada and a plain-jane princess whom he has no desire to marry. Treece might easily have sunk to the depths of Gilbertian derision, and we would have had a lot more laughs if he had. Instead, he treats his readers as seriously as he does his characters, and the result is a thoughtprovoking adventure.
I found the ancient-times ploy more imaginatively handled by Lucy M. Boston in The Stones of Green Knowe (Puffin 60p). By pushing her hero through a chink in the time-space continuum, she finds an ingenious way of imparting a history lecture to the unsuspecting reader, because Roger, a 12th-centurY boy watching the family manor house being built, returns to the site in 1660, 1800 and just the other day, noting the changes, not only to the building but to the surrounding countryside. The arrival of windows in 1800 enchants him, but by our own times, we are all breathing 'stale, dead air', and the absence of partridges, wagtails and goldfinches, to say nothing of the disappearance of wild flowers, has reduced England to a condition of congested barbarism. Again the text requires close attention by the reader, and even the Yggdrasil, beloved of Times crossword compilers, puts in a fleeting appearance. But the tautness of the time-shifts, achieved by blowing on a dandelion-clock, make Miss Boston's story an adventure in the best sense of the word.
A dash in the opposite direction is represented by The Glitterball (Methuen Pied Piper £2.95) in which Howard Thompson adopts the weary device of visitors from a distant planet. The glitterball is 'a starship about the size of a small melon', and its presence on the planet Earth a useful excuse for likely young chaps to talk about radar scanners, mother-ships and rockets, all mixed up with cornflake packets, window-cleaners and the rest of the contrasting minutiae of mundane existence. There is a lot of 'What happened next he could be sure of and 'He was never certain whether he had seen it or not', and in the end the mysterious entities from some distant civilisation whose intelligence is far inferior to our own disappear in the night sky. So far as Power of Three (Puffin 60p) is concerned, I'm not sure what it is about because I had some trouble grasping the logical premise on which Diana Wynne Jones based her plot. There are lots of giants and fairies floating about, and once again the names, 0g. Ondo, are likely to invite unkind remarks from philistine quarters. But mixed up with the magic and the mythology are people singing 'Nelly Dean' (sic), and flickers of latterday scepticism, as when somebody says, 'Gerald, you ought to be a politician', and Gerald responds hotly with 'Is that meant to be funny?' Those who retain a keen interest in nasty monsters will be pleased to learn from the text that 'the only good Dorig is a dead Dorig'. There at least little has changed in the last 500 years.
With some relief I turn from all the perils and tensions of the adventuresome life to the world of Sid Fleischmann, who will stop at nothing to raise a laugh. McBroom (Puffin 60p) consists of two tales featuring Josh McBroom, who is jest plain folks, and exults in a tall story, to say nothing of a tall estate. When he buys an 80-acre property from a friend, it is only later that he discovers that each of the 80 acres is placed directly on top of the next, and that the whole shooting match is under water. And then, after asking us to believe that the weather was so cold that he had to fry the sunshine, McBroom, displaying all the effrontery of the frontier farmer says 'I dislike to tell you this, but some folks have no regard for the truth'. McBroom is a perfect disgrace and a perfect delight; what puzzles me slightly is how far the credit should go to Fleischmann and how far to the marvellous illustrations of Quentin Blake. Wherever the laurel belongs, if it is quiet parent's life you are after, don't get McBroom, because boys between the ages of nine and 12 will be inspired by the text to emit persistent guffaws.
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