I know that Kate Saunders is a huge fan of E. Nesbit’s
classic Five Children and It so – in
addition to the fact that her novel won the 2014 Costa prize and has been
short-listed for this year’s Guardian Fiction Prize – I wanted to see how she
would weave these two books together, especially since I didn’t enjoy the
original.
The Prologue begins in1905, when the Psammead (an ancient
sand fairy) takes Cyril, Robert, Anthea and Jane twenty five years into the
future (1930) to meet their old friend, the Professor. It’s only when they’ve
left that Anthea wishes that she’d looked at his photographs more clearly. She
remarks: “I didn’t see any grown-up men who
looked a bit like you boys – I wonder why not.”
She doesn’t know that the Professor is crying after they’ve
left – and so am I!
This story is wonderfully done. The Psammead re-appears just
as the First World War is breaking out. By this time, Edith, aged nine, has
been born and she is our link to the original story.
“Everything
interesting happened before I was born,” Edith sighs when she sees the Psammead
for the first time. She’d heard the wonderful stories of magic and flying
adventures from her older siblings. And what about this marvellous sentence?
Edith again: she could almost smell the
wave of magic that had suddenly swept into her life and the bigguns almost
forgot they were grown up.
How the reader wishes those children hadn’t had to grow up.
The tone of the novel slowly darkens as Cyril is sent to France,
thinking that the war will soon be over; followed the next year by Bobs and
then Anthea as a nurse at the front. The war goes on and on, as does the
Psammead’s stay with the family.
The tour de force of this novel is the back-story that is
given to the creature – “I’m a senior sand-fairy, not an animal!” he
protests. A complicated and humorous investigation by the children in the
British Library reveals that this grumpy sand fairy was once a desert god who
had killed thousands of people. He snaps, ‘I
don’t know how many of them died. Numbers aren’t important.’ Who will
forget the vision of the skeleton, pointing with its bony arm at the Psammead,
crying, “REPENT.”
This is a marvellous device, weaving the Psammead’s
predicament with the terrible war, which comes to the reader through letters,
home leave and occasional flying visits, with the Psammead, to the Western
Front. Before the poignant ending, Cyril asks the sand-fairy, ‘Since when have you cared about dying?’
In this brilliant anti-war novel, there is no attempt to
imitate E. Nesbit – just pages full of humour
and pathos, peopled by characters who are individuals that we care about, and whom
we desperately hope will survive the war.
It is the Psammead in the end who sums up war. “Wars never change. It’s basically two sides
trying to kill each other.”
The Epilogue, set in 1930, in which we meet Anthea’s
daughter, assures us that “once magic is
with us, it never disappears.”
Do I need to tell you that I’m now reading Five Children and It?
Pauline Francis www.pf@paulinefrancis.co.uk
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1 comment:
I loved this book too - having been a great fan of E Nesbit's original series I was intrigued by this one, and couldn't put it down. As with the originals, it was by turns funny and exciting, but with our own knowledge of what was in store for them all between 1914 and 1918 it was impossible to escape the underlying sense of foreboding. Brilliant!
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