two hundred public words 6/30

Yikes... I feel like I am slowing down on this meme. But I'd like to try to complete the whole thing, sort of out of grim persistence. Also, I am not going to note the fact that it is after midnight and therefore not the 17th anymore. It is functionally the seventeenth of July, okay?

To keep with the writery/readery theme, then... Michelle Magorian. Michelle Magorian is a writer who found her happy place, in terms of setting and theme, and she's sticking with it. I am not complaining about this -- her setting is England just during and after World War II, and she does a brilliant job of showing what England was like at different class levels, in different areas -- urban, rural -- and for both genders. Her most well-known book is Good Night, Mister Tom, which became a made-for-tv movie starring John Thaw, the guy who played Inspector Morse, as a reclusive, cranky old man in a small village at the outset of the Second World War who is forced by circumstance to take in a child evacuated from a working class district in London. The child has been abused, and the story explores this as well as the chosen family that Mister Tom and Will Beech form. It's also a coming of age story, a story of the social changes wrought by the war, and a good (okay, something of a starry-eyed, brimming-with-nostalgia) portrait of both English village life in the 1940s and of the London Blitz.

Her other stories are all in that same world, or in the early 1950s, after the war, and they're equally good -- some even better, and longer. Only a few of them have been published in the US, but I ended up getting some of them from England, because I like them so much.

Titles:

Good Night, Mister Tom

Back Home -- about a girl who was evacuated to a bohemian American family in upstate New York, who returns to Britain after the war to find that she no longer fits into her stuffy middle class context -- and, throughout the story, it slowly becomes clear that her mother does not, either. Excellent. It works for me both as an entry in the girls-fantasize-about-going-to-boarding-school genre, though it is trying to explode that, AND as an entrant in a particular subgenre *I* like, about counterculture in the late 1940s and 1950s... the underside of McCarthyism, if you will. There is an interesting and odd bit of connection to C. S. Lewis, in that the experimental modern schools he EXCORIATES in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I think... the book which introduces Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole, at any rate), Magorian extolls, and to the same degree. I appreciated this.

Not a Swan (this is called something else in its American version, I can't remember what) -- a teenage girl and her two older sisters go to stay for the summer in a rural area while their mother tours with the British version of the USO. They learn how to be more independent (again shedding a class background that will no longer work so well after the war) and the protagonist experiences a sexual and eventually romantic awakening. She also succeeds at writing for publication, and solves a sort of mystery. This story is great about blinkered experiences of gender in the past, and about the vexing question of premarital sex, and when experimentation around that became more commonplace.

Cuckoo in the Nest Working class boy in post-war England yearns to be an actor

A Spoonful of Jam His younger sister goes to a posh school and also gets drawn into acting

Just Henry A boy wants to work in movies -- actually a cameraman -- and his family has issues because of a mysterious war death.

I haven't give the last three such long treatments just because my entries are tending to get a bit long. But be assured they're just as good -- Magorian is, after all, on her home stomping grounds here as well.

In fact, they're all great. I don't care if she ploughs the same literary ground forever; I just wish she'd write some more.

two hundred public words 7/30

There. If I save this now and edit it, it will come out on July 18th, Sunday.

Ha ha! Success, in time-stamping this entry. I just got back from Inception... what a cast -- at least, I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Cillian Murphy and that girl who played Juno --, ah, thank you IMDb, Ellen Page. And the guy who played the "chemist", Dileep Rao. And Ken Watanabe, for that matter. I TOTALLY did not recognize Tom Berenger... man, it's been a long time since I saw him in Platoon, in the theater. Apart from the cast though, the movie was much more McGuffin and concept than it was script or acting, sigh. Not an utter waste of time, but... what they call in Bollywood terms a 'timepass'. It was also (unexpectedly) of Bollywood duration, at almost three hours long.

Hm. It says 2 1/2 hours, but we didn't get out of the theater until almost 11:25, and the movie was billed as starting at 8:30.

Anyway. This entry was meant to be about the next YAF author on my list, who happens to be the British author K. M. Peyton. Peyton has been writing both historical and contemporary Brit YAF since the 1950s, with her more recent forays deeper into historical YAF. She has a book published as late as 2008, in fact, a trilogy set in Roman Britain, now, "for younger readers", and so far two books set in turn-of-the-19th-century Britain (and the new penal colony Australia), Small Gains* and Greater Gains.

Many of her earlier books are of the variety known as 'a girl and her horse' novels. Or her pony. I am not too into horses, so although I read those books -- like her Flambards series, which combines interest in horses with early (WWI) aviation -- I wasn't AS into them as the three she wrote about an Angry Young Man in the early 1970s. These three, Pennington's Seventeenth Summer**, The Beethoven Medal, and Pennington's Heir, are enjoyable both for their treatment of class -- the protagonist is the son of a bitter Irish woman and her labouring husband, I think in East Anglia-ish -- and of the period. I mean, the first book was published in 1970, but now they function almost as historical documents of the culture and politics of the period. At the outset of the trilogy, Pennington is in his final year at a comprehensive school where he is rebelling against the form masters by growing his hair long and playing "O Tannenbaum" at school assemblies, because it is the same tune as "The Worker's Flag" ("The workers' flag is deepest red/it oft has shrouded our martyred dead/So raise the workers' banner high/under it, we'll live or die/though cowards flinch and traitors sneer/we'll keep the red flag flying here"). The book also delves into the growing subculture of English folk songs -- the Child ballads and their rediscovery by folk artists of the sixties and seventies. Pennington, whose surname is used so consistently that it's hard for me to remember that his first name is Patrick, is a virtuoso piano prodigy, sprung from unlikely working class roots. But he has a volatile temper and deeply repressed angers that get him into constant trouble.

The whole trilogy has believable emotional depth, in Pennington's simmering frustration with feeling trapped by social expectations wherever he goes, and in the sort of hungering, hopeless romanticism that teenagers love (a more middle class girl, one of Peyton's pony heroines from at least one other novel, possibly two -- Ruth -- falls for Pennington and also does another sort of falling...). The books are hard to get hold of these days -- my mother and sister bought them used for me for last Christmas, but they're worth taking the trouble.

The last book of her more than sixty published works that I want to talk about is one from 1983, as Thatcher was consolidating her iron grip on Britain. It's called Who, Sir? Me, Sir? and is also a portrait of working class youth, in this case several misfits from a comprehensive school whose main teacher decides to enter them in a tetrathlon competition (some kind of 'athlon, anyway -- one with running, swimming, shooting, and horseriding) against kids from a local posh 'public school', as they insist on confusingly calling fee-demanding schools. This book does bring horses into it, but it's a great look at believable kids, from a weedy boy who is so self-doubting that he utters the titular sentence on such a regular basis that his nickname is Hoomey, to a Sikh boy whose grandfather was in the Cavalry, to a girl who hasn't quite got the hang of puberty yet, to a boy under constant threat of juvenile detention, or the borstal, whatever they call it.

Now I want to go find her recent books. I bet they're not available on any of my newfangled e-book reader forms -- not iBooks, not Amazon for Kindle, not Borders, not Kobe, or Barnes & Noble. Let's see. Nope, none of them are available in electronic-form, on any of the services I just listed. Sigh. But I can order them used from Amazon...

Anyway -- K. M. Peyton -- highly recommended!

*on Amazon, Small Gains is listed as selling NEW for ... $479.06. You can get it used from $4.55.

**in the US, I think the first one was also titled Pennington's Last Year. At school.