2017/102: Five Children on the Western Front -- Kate Saunders

[tamaranth]

2017/102: Five Children on the Western Front -- Kate Saunders

"I saw a couple of pictures of ladies who looked a bit like Mother, and might have been me or Jane. But I didn't see any grown-up men who looked a bit like you boys – I wonder why not."
Far away in 1930, in his empty room, the old professor was crying. [loc 123]

A fine example of the genre I like to call 'literary fan fiction': this is a sequel of sorts to E. Nesbit's Five Children and It, in which the eponymous 'five children' (Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother, known as the Lamb) encounter a Psammead, a grumpy being that claims to be a sand fairy, and grants wishes which seldom turn out as the children intend.

Nesbit's novel was published in 1902: these children will grow up and come of age just in time for the First World War. Kate Saunders' novel deals with that, and with the Psammead's own past. Five Children on the Western Front opens with a Prologue set in 1905 -- within the timeframe of the original novel -- in which the children ask for another trip to the future, and the Psammead takes them to 1930. (That's where the quote above comes from.) It's a nice way of foreshadowing the events of the main part of the novel, which begins in October 1914 with Hilary (formerly known as the Lamb) and Edie (who wasn't even born when her older siblings met the Psammead) stumbling across the 'sacred sleeping place' of an ancient, irritable desert creature.

The Psammead is especially irritable, it transpires, because it's been through 'some sort of violent magical upheaval' and has been transplanted from its 'proper hole' by powers unknown. ('You're a refugee,', says Anthea.) The nature of that upheaval, and the solution to it, occupies Edie, the Lamb and Jane for the rest of the book. Cyril is in the army, Robert's at university, Anthea at art school, but their stories are as much a part of the plot as the immediate interactions of the younger children with their new friend, the retired desert god.

Saunders won the Costa Children's Book of the Year for this novel, though I do wonder how well Modern Children will get along with it: the style is evocative of Nesbit's (though the story's somewhat faster-paced) and the characters very much of their time. There are weighty themes (moral relativity, war, women's suffrage, class inequality) running through the story, though they don't overwhelm the charming, and often funny, fantasy elements.

I couldn't help mentally comparing Five Children on the Western Front to A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, although the two novels are doing very different things: Saunders is exploring the characters and their futures (and in the Psammead's case, its past), while Byatt is more concerned with the author behind the story. Yet both are concerned with the way that the First World War was a crashing full stop to a myth of an idyllic golden age of childhood. ... And now I want to read the Byatt again!

Comments

[coth]

I've had The Children's Book here for several years, but not read it. Now I want to read that and this.

Oh well. After Follycon.

[anef]

I liked The Children's Book so much that I bought a presentation copy of it. It was so much more up my street than Possession, although I've liked some of her other works. But it is profoundly anti-fantasy, and thus completely antithetical to some of the things that I value most in literature.

[coth]

You make it even more interesting. I loved Possession, and the several shorter books I have read since. But I'm a much more analytical reader these days, so who knows what I will find...

[tamaranth]

anef's comment has inspired me to reread Byatt! (Especially good since I have been doing the book equivalent of Dry January -- like the alcohol version, this may be a reaction to overindulgence in the festive period ...)

[tamaranth]

I had not registered The Children's Book as being anti-fantasy -- I'd read it more as 'fantasy has ruined these particular people's reality'. But (like coth below) I did not read as critically then as I do now: and also, this is another excuse to reread Byatt. (I didn't get along with most of her other novels, though Ragnarok is amazing.)

[anef]

I may have Ragnarok somewhere. Must go and look.

[conuly]

Many children still enjoy Nesbit. Other than a few random racist elements - which, due to the episodic style of those books you can generally skip over - they hold up pretty darn well.

But personally, I wasn't sure that Nesbit and WWI meshed well together in this particular book.

Also: Found you via random link following, mind if I add?

[tamaranth]

Not just the racism, but the class issues, and the prose style (much wordier than recent children's literature) ... I was impressed by the way this novel followed the children, grown up, into war: I felt it worked pretty well. Do read the Byatt novel if you get the chance!

and feel free to add -- this blog is pretty much just book reviews.

[conuly]

the prose style (much wordier than recent children's literature)

That's... debatable. It depends on what children's literature you're looking at, I suppose, and how you're defining the word "wordier".

[tamaranth]

There are more authorial asides, and longer paragraphs: for instance
Now that I have begun to tell you about the place, I feel that I could go on and make [Pg 6]this into a most interesting story about all the ordinary things that the children did,—just the kind of things you do yourself, you know, and you would believe every word of it; and when I told about the children's being tiresome, as you are sometimes, your aunts would perhaps write in the margin of the story with a pencil, "How true!" or "How like life!" and you would see it and would very likely be annoyed. So I will only tell you the really astonishing things that happened, and you may leave the book about quite safely, for no aunts and uncles either are likely to write "How true!" on the edge of the story. Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. That is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you can see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy; and why they say that the earth goes round the sun, when you can see for yourself any day that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at [Pg 7]night like a good sun as it is, and the earth knows its place, and lies as still as a mouse. Yet I daresay you believe all that about the earth and the sun, and if so you will find it quite easy to believe that before Anthea and Cyril and the others had been a week in the country they had found a fairy. At least they called it that, because that was what it called itself; and of course it knew best, but it was not at all like any fairy you ever saw or heard of or read about.

[conuly]

I see what you meant now.