Dartmoor prison and inhabitant
Sep. 24th, 2006 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraKingcup Calling, by Alec Lea. I picked up this and A Whiff of Boarhound, by the same author, at the same time – they’re 1970s British children’s fiction, from the time when realism – usually gritty, usually depressing – was coming into vogue. The back cover has blurbs for similar books, including an enthusiastic TLS summary for one called Gulls: “[A] sensitive, realistic account of three teenage girls growing up in a bleak unattractive town in the north-east […] one of them becomes pregnant and attempts to commit suicide. The story is told in flat unpoetic prose that exactly suits its subject matter.”
I have no idea why I don’t immediately want to track it down. – Tom, a farm boy, falls in love with Maisie (a farm girl), but the farms are forcibly closed down, they lose touch and end up in distant cities, he ends up with a bad crowd and, ultimately in Dartmoor Prison, and she goes to Australia (yes, this is cheery – eventually). This is all backstory – the story itself starts with a family heading off on a camping holiday on Dartmoor. They become half-witnesses, half-participants, in Tom’s escape and ultimate reconciliation with Maisie.
It’s a children’s book not because the children who are camping are vital to the story, but because Tom and Maisie’s lives, or at least their emotional ones, stopped at thirteen when they left their farms. I’m not sure whether the author sees this as specific to them, or to farmers – there are hints of that “closer to the land” thing. The children’s father is a vicar, and sympathetic to Tom (and quietly obstructionist to the police), but he does try and steer him towards the behaviour he wants; I like that Tom shrugs this aside. The vicar gets a lot of the viewpoint as well, and in the end I don’t think this works as a story because too many other unnecessary people get involved in it.
I have no idea why I don’t immediately want to track it down. – Tom, a farm boy, falls in love with Maisie (a farm girl), but the farms are forcibly closed down, they lose touch and end up in distant cities, he ends up with a bad crowd and, ultimately in Dartmoor Prison, and she goes to Australia (yes, this is cheery – eventually). This is all backstory – the story itself starts with a family heading off on a camping holiday on Dartmoor. They become half-witnesses, half-participants, in Tom’s escape and ultimate reconciliation with Maisie.
It’s a children’s book not because the children who are camping are vital to the story, but because Tom and Maisie’s lives, or at least their emotional ones, stopped at thirteen when they left their farms. I’m not sure whether the author sees this as specific to them, or to farmers – there are hints of that “closer to the land” thing. The children’s father is a vicar, and sympathetic to Tom (and quietly obstructionist to the police), but he does try and steer him towards the behaviour he wants; I like that Tom shrugs this aside. The vicar gets a lot of the viewpoint as well, and in the end I don’t think this works as a story because too many other unnecessary people get involved in it.
