Children's books
Gillian Avery
The Borrowers Avenged Mary Norton Illustrated by Pauline Baynes (Kestrel £5.50) The Song of Pentecost W. J. Corbett Illustrated by Martin Ursell (Methuen £5.95) The BFG Roald Dahl Illustrated by Quentin Blake (Cape £6.50) Winter Quarters William Mayne (Cape £5.50) War Without Friends Evert Hartman Translated by Patricia Crampton (Chatto & Windus £5.50) n 1961 three Borrowers, Pod, Homily, -Land Arrietty, all members of the Clock family, made a perilous escape by balloon from the attic where their greedy human kidnappers had immured them in the expec- tation of making a fortune out of putting these six-inch beings on show. They made their way back to the model village whence they had been snatched, and found that their old home had been marvellously refur- bished — even to water in the taps and a miniature electricity system; and Arrietty revealed to her horrified parents that it was because she had allowed herself to become friendly with human beings. And there the book ended, as all the Borrower books have ended, with insecurity, for the Borrowers are like the human beings they despise and yet depend upon, forever pursuing a stabili- ty, a happiness, that cannot be achieved in this world.
And now, 21 years later, we are told how the Clock family reacted to Arrietty's bombshell. We knew at the end of The Bor- rowers Aloft that they would not be able to stay in Little Fordham. The Borrowers Avenged shows how they left, where they went, and what happened to their captors. Travelling by water in an old knife box pro- pelled by a knitting geedle, and taking with them the dolls' house furniture that Arriet- ty's human friends had provided for the model house, they make their way painfully to the Old Rectory, empty now except for its two caretakers (Borrowers cannot exist without humans to borrow from), and there they make a new home under the library floor. We know by now that there can be no permanency for them here. "I only wanted her to know we were safe," ' Ar- rietty says of her human friend. 'Peagreen looked back at her. "Are we?" he said gently. "Are we? Ever?" 'And on this note the book ends.
There is nothing in The Borrowers Avenged to indicate that there has been a gap of some two decades in the narration, or that 30 years have elapsed since the original Borrowers appeared. We meet a new Borrower, Peagreen (the last survivor of those upper-crust Overmantels that Homily has talked about with suspicious resentment ever since we knew her), and it is Peagreen rather than the nomadic Spiller that Arrietty seems destined to marry. But this fifth chronicle extends from the others with immaculate continuity. There is the same marvellous exactness of the detail, the extraordinary sustained feat of imagining the world from grass level, the poignance of these small creatures who mirror human follies and human longings. With Tolkien, Mary Norton will probably be remembered as this century's supreme creator of a fan- tasy world.
Two days after I began grappling with W. J. Corbett's The Song of Pentecost it was announced as this year's Whitbread winner. I can only record my perplexity, both at the choice of the judges, and at the book itself. It is a story, as two or three books a year have been ever since Watership Down, of an animal exodus, this time of harvest mice whose habitat has become unbearably polluted. The author, who lives in Birm- ingham, describes the blighted landscape with feeling, but the telling of the story verges on the inconsequential and my guess T
is that the version
The uS bp el icstha et odr m4 Dusetcehmabeerbiget:e,g cut down from something much longelt; New characters, few of them behaving any consistency, keep aPOe37,, spasmodically throughout the course of tu" book, and then disappearing as arbitrariVo. Thus Snake and the mendacious frog w11,,i at one stage appear to be the coin.11 ' characters, have been abandoned 1°.g, before the end, and two boys materiallt: out of nowhere on the penultimate le and do in Pentecost, the mouse leader.l. ultimate page hints at the resurrection rit Pentecost but he has made very little intila1 on the reader and the purpose of thisr. is II' clear. One admires the writer for his detie mination to write about the countrYsitt and I hope he will realise his ambition to 'look out of a window at a green field'' kinio I am afraid this doesn't make the book good one. Roald Dahl's new book, The BFG, winner. It is very funny and exciting' Ill some at a cracking pace. There are i some satisfyingly rude jokes, and all 19„tal would say that it would make an Christmas present for anyone of five, link; wards. BFG stands for Big Friendly 'jS 'nev'Merel gTohbeblointhgerusp, yhuman l btehaen soc hTellr 51 5, gobbling them up every night, but notrneblv is a freaky Giant! I is a nice and ili,11!ant Giant! I is the only nice and jurnblY in Giant Country!" 9. He and nice, sellfsidle Sophie, aged eight, with the helP Queen of England (Quentin Blake's to ings are particularly funny here) nnanagt,e4. defeat the other giants and immobse t''`Ccr The British Army and Air Force be operate, reluctantly. "You must rOt giving up so easy," ' the BFG tells the';d "The first titchy bobsticle you inee,it you begin shouting you is biffsquiggl'.h'er When it is all over, Sophieencourages ri) large friend to learn to use English PrnPers. and to write up his account of the Wild, tion. The Queen reads it aloud to her graeo children, and every parent and grancillaf ought to do the same. • not William Mayne's Winter Quarters Is tbe going to have this universal appeal- isto story of fairground people all rters children's strange search for winter for them, and for a leader. AS alWaerg• William Mayne has succeeded in 01/libels ing himself in the identity of the peopift. pot writing about, and here has taken ov''kese only the roundabout way that travellers speak, but also the'llrctrewtirry, thinking. Atmospherically it is Inasteor with a wonderful feel of the north vail colnshire landscape, and of the earaasy, people and their children, but it is not e felt and there were many moments when l „rug- that I was in a late Turner landscape, '.' ous gmliinstg. to make my way through a luril nl
translated '
Evert dH afrttomma nt 'hs e War t Dutch, sFtrraleira forward account of wartime Holland boy ostracised because of his father s to allegiance. It is unusual and interestilins point nthe t o f G view. n occupation from a Os
Previous page
