Another book read following a review in Planet
To echo the Planet review it would be a mistake to assume that because the protagonists of this story are children that the book is in anyway childish. The story is really captivating, and while the basic plot is straight out of the Famous Five, even this Blyton fan will admit that there is a really powerful depth of characterization here that is absence in the one dimensional thrills of Blyton’s work.
One of the strengths of the book is that you are transported into the Second World War atmosphere in which “careless talk costs lives” and so it is completely believable that the lead character 60 years on has only a partial understanding of the events that unfolded around her – and then even the space of decades does not allow every question to be answered – in fact in the final pages of the book new questions enter the frame just where you expected there to be a tying up of the loose ends.
The back drop of the drama is the evacuation of the National Gallery to a quarry in the mountains of Wales – this was an evocative symbol of the British war effort, a token perhaps to prove that we the British were fighting for civilization in the face of the brutal and inhumane Nazis. The book nods in the direction of these grand themes but thankfully avoids getting bogged down in them – it would have been an easy trap to fall into by inserting a long and clunky essay on the state of the humanity into the mouth of one of the rural teenagers.
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