Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Is it a feature of children’s literature that the reader should engage immediately and completely with the story’s main character? The Railway Children’s Roberta and Michael in Kensuke’s Kingdom (Morpurgo) immediately excite sympathy, I would even say love. This is the case with Noah Clarke, an eleven year-old from our very-own Dudley, member of a ‘blended’ family for the moment dysfunctional. Yet the story begins with seven people on the move, indicating that there is journeying, emotional as well as physical, still to come.

The scene changes to an island, far out from England’s southern coasts, beyond phone signals, where mainland conditions cease to exist. Forsythia has nevertheless persisted in the memory of one of the seven travellers, as a place of friendship, good health and prosperity. On arrival the family see straightaway that, instead of dolphins in the surrounding waters there are now sharks, and the Delphberry, the island’s sole cash crop, is now extinct. For each of the family members, despite the kindness of the Forsythian people and the sheer beauty of rock, surf and flora, the holiday looks like being a disaster.

As to inhabitants, I found myself burdened by the number of characters in the book’s early chapters; however the appearance of each was described in such perfect detail that I visualised them all. The same was true, crucially for me as reader, in the picturing of each scene. In this there was very little elaboration: it is this writer’s gift to go straight to the key element that illuminates that inner world, to make it alive with highly coloured imagery.

J Warner Forbes is a master of the sentence; her practice has to be to work away till cadence and meaning are entirely right; each construction has its own tension and force and there is never slackening. I sense that as she wrote she had a reader in mind, somebody quite like me though several decades younger, around whose mental resistance she, determinedly, would find a way.