WILD WOOD by Jan Needle. Reviewed by Dennis Hamley.

The reissue of this marvellous novel must rank as a Literary Event. First published in 1981 by Andre Deutsch with unforgettably brilliant illustrations by Wiiliam Rushton, Wild Wood should have been widely recognised for the classic book it undoubtedly is instead of going out of print early.

Well, to some of us, it always has been a classic and its reissue, revised and even improved, after nearly forty-five years, is an occasion to celebrate.

It’s not a sequel to The Wind in the Willows. It’s not a retelling in any but the vaguest sense. It’s a complete re-imagining, a companion piece, almost a concordance to the original, as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is to Hamlet. 

Oh, in Wind in the Willows, how disturbed Ratty, Mole and even Mr Badger are by the Wild Wood. It’s a place of evil, fear, intimidation and danger which we as readers, feel tangibly with Mole as he nervously traverses it. Stoats and weasels are threatening, nightmare creatures who disturb dreams. They are, if you’ll excuse the word, oiks. The privileged upper class Riverbankers never think that the wild Wood may contain a viable, relatively comfortable and unthreatening society – unthreatening unless they themselves feel threatened. Well, they do feel threatened. We’re seeing Wind in the Willows from the Wildwooders’ point of view and it’s not hard to realise that this is a novel about class and revolution and a valuable social document about Edwardian society.

The tale is told by Baxter Ferret, an unassuming animal, a sort of wide-eyed Everyman who stands slightly apart from the main action with an engagingly critical semi-detachment. He loves his cars, his machinery, his family and his beer. Old cars and home brewing are among the novel’s main preoccupations and part of the warm, protective, though often cold and hungry world of the Wood. 

Concealed beer jokes abound. For example, the professional agitator who arrives to spark the Wildwooders into revolution is Boddington Stoat, who is ‘peculiarly yellow, a little lacking in body, extremely bitter but one of the best.’ Anyone who has spent time in a Manchester pub will know exactly what Jan Needle is talking about. Baxter’s first ‘gaffer’ on the farm has a petrol wagon, a Throckmorton Squeezer ‘with …six cylinders each big enough to boil Cider in.” Cedric Willoughby, the ancient journalist, drives an ‘Armstrong Hardcastle Mouton Special Eight. 1907 with the whirling poppets…’ Such madly exaggerated machines populate the story. Yes, it’s full of loving detail of a tightly-knit working class society. Yet the Riverbankers are not entirely excoriated. Baxter may dismiss Ratty as a poetic sort of dreamer but there’s a measure of affection there. 

 

However, it’s much more than that. As a satire, Wild Wood is on a par with Animal Farm. Both recount flawed revolutions. Yes, the Wildwooders do take over Toad Hall, rename it Brotherhood Hall, and the egregious Toad - a creation as gross as the Toad Grahame creates, still funny but also a symbol of repression - is driven out. But, unlike Orwell’s revolution, this is one is not entirely successful. Grahame’s narrative cannot be tampered with. The revolutionaries settle for less than domination. Boddington’s fanaticism is tempered as he marries Baxter’s sister Dolly. We know that Mr Toad will return. The revolution peters out rather good-naturedly with a sort of rapprochement between Riverbankers and the Wildwooders, the upper class and the working class. We can look round us nowadays and say ‘If only it had lasted!’ 

 

Funny, profound, superbly written, deeply satisfying: Wild Wood has so many qualities. Perhaps the book didn’t make the impact it should in 1981 because staunch Grahame supporters thought it disrespectful. Far from it. As with all good satires, there is a strong element of homage to the original. The Wind in the Willows is a quintessentially British book. 

Even though it springs from a radically different social and political perspective, so is Wild Wood. Read it, cry with laughter and close it knowing that the two books together have provided you with a conspectus of a whole society in a particular age but still relevant for all of time.

Wild Wood by Jan Needle. Published by Golden Duck 2014. ISBN 978 189926221 2 £9.99

Thanks to Authors Electric for this portrait of Jan Needle. Another excellent blog to visit!

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The Lion of Sole Bay by Julia Jones. Reviewed by Dennis Hamley.

The Lion of Sole Bay by Julia Jones

Reviewed by Dennis Hamley

The Lion of Sole Bay is most suited for the 11 -16 age group. Its plot is sophisticated and the language level is fairly high. The prose is lucid and concrete but makes few concessions to less confident readers. 

Julia Jones's Strong Winds trilogy, with its acknowledged debt to and echoes of Arthur Ransome translates into a tale set in a relentlessly and realistically troubled modern world. 

The trilogy stands as a remarkable achievement and a speaking example of how the world of independent publishing is becoming as potent a force as the now ailing image of traditional commercial publishing. 

 Is The Lion of Sole Bay a continuation of the Strong Winds trilogy? I don’t think so.  Luke, the main character, was a minor player in those stories and the new main characters only inhabit this imaginative world, although their issues with adults are as urgent and desperate as anything depicted in the earlier books.  This novel has a tighter structure altogether than the free-ranging trilogy. The issues raised are subtler and more complex - and more terrifying as well. The characters are drawn with unsentimental accuracy and some ugly depths are plumbed of a sort which never appeared in Strong Winds, outspoken though that was – including the attempted wholesale drugging of everybody coming to a party, which may sound funny but certainly isn’t! 

This is an ambitious novel in a way different from – and an advance on - its predecessors. Luke is hoping for a week with his father in his boat Lowestoft Lass. He's thwarted by an injury to his father in which the hyperactive Angel is involved in a way which, at first, Luke completely misinterprets, thus setting off the first of many important flashpoints.  Meanwhile Helen is desperate to get home to Holland but is trapped on board the Drie Vrouwen with Hendrike, her drug-fuelled mother, and Elsevier, the Kapitein, the fanatical friend who controls her. These two women are dangerous and frightening. The nerve-shredding climax involves all the young people trapped in the out-of-control Drie Vrouwen at the mercy of a wild sea and two seriously disturbed and incompetent adults. 

What binds all these elements together, besides the waning moon, Hallowe'en and Julia Jones’s understanding and love of boats and the sea? The Lion of the title was once the figurehead of the Stavoreen, a 48-gun ship of the Dutch navy, but now used as a pub sign. It is both a memorial of a seventeenth century naval battle between the English and the Dutch and a potent national symbol which Elsevier believes has to be recovered to further her delusional dreams of power. 

This is an extraordinary mix which at first sight looks almost impossible to handle as a coherent plot. But Jones succeeds magnificently. The plot lines are sharp; the writing, especially in the tense, dangerous climax, is taut and economical: the tension is almost unbearable. And, not as bits stuck on but essential to the novel's structure, there's even a mad old man in the woods who must be homage to Arthur Ransome's Old Peter, he of the Russian Tales, and a series of lectures on the 1672 Battle of Sole Bay by a character so keen to deliver them that he'll use the garden gnomes as an audience. Terrific book.  I loved every word.

The Lion of Sole Bay by Julia Jones

Published by Golden Duck: £7.99

ISBN 978 1 899262 18 2

Also available on Kindle:  £3.99

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The Long Journey of Joslin de Lay by Dennis Hamley. Reviewed by Ann Turnbull.

Some years ago I was asked the review The False Father, the last in Dennis Hamley's series of six medieval murder mysteries linked by a quest story.  I can't now remember much about that story except that I enjoyed it and wished I'd read the other five first.

Now, I'm glad to say, I shall have the chance.  The books have been out of print, but Dennis Hamley is gradually reissuing them as e-books under the title The Long Journey of Joslin de Lay.

The first two books, Of Dooms and Death and A Pact with Death, are already available.  They are Kindle editions - and the covers, by Anastasia Sichkarenko, are stunning.

The books are set in the mid-1300s, when England and France were at war, and concern a 17-year-old French minstrel, Joslin de Lay, who escapes to England after the murder of his father.  England - an enemy country - might seem a bad choice, but Joslin is on a quest to find his lost mother, and his ultimate destination is Wales.  However, not only is Joslin, as a Frenchman, feared and threatened in England, but he has been followed there by a mysterious stranger.

Joslin's adventures begin in the East Anglian village of Stovenham, where two young artists from London are painting a Doom (a picture of the descent of dead souls into Hell).  He is befriended by the artists, but the locals are hostile to him.  And when a series of gruesome murders occurs, linked to the Doom, Joslin is suspected.  He is forced to flee to London, where he is immediately caught up in another series of murders, this time linked to the plague.

These fast-paced stories blend adventure, mystery, friendship and romance.  There is just enough detail about medieval life and beliefs to bring the period to life without overwhelming the narrative.  And, since Joslin is a minstrel, there are tantalising snatches of the songs he sings.  I found myself wishing the series came with a CD.

Published as a Kindle edition on Amazon, 2012.



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