Friends and Traitors by Helen Peters
| Friends and Traitors by Helen Peters | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Downton Villains, perhaps, as a new maid and a girl dumped on a country house used as her wartime boarding school unite to work out what nefarious goings-on are afoot. Not exactly a story set in our times, and not one that exactly feels written ideally for it, either. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Maybe |
| Pages: 272 | Date: July 2023 |
| Publisher: Nosy Crow Ltd | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781788004640 | |
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England, WW2. Two young girls are new at the country pile called Stanbrook. One is Nancy, destined to be in service all her life it seems, like the female generations before her. The other is Sidney, a girl from a hoity-toity Sussex boarding school that has been removed there away from bomber flight-paths. The girls are chalk and cheese, and if we hadn't guessed that then their behaviour with each other over their first encounters would only prove it so. But something is amiss, and first separately and then in combination they realise the Lord Evesham must be a rum 'un. Midnight deliveries are received under cover of secrecy, talk is made of meetings with Germans, and not only that, a local Spitfire factory has been attacked. But surely the girls are wrong, and the upper class could never be so underhand?
Let's start with the negatives about this. First, it wants to show the very plummy style of speech and behaviour in the war days, right from the off, but has borrowed too much of that. Despite Sidney writing in modern-sounding colloquial abbrevs to her brov, this felt like something I would have rejected as being too old-fashioned, even back in my day. Yes, this shows the constrictions of school life for the girls, and of course the class difference between the two leads, but it's stodgy, toffy, and too high-falutin'. I did make a mistake of reading Sidney's first letter to her airman brother thinking it a male Sidney, but the stuffy voice was so easy to adopt – and to see across other pages.
To revert to the positives, I have to say they were there, if late in proving themselves. When the jolly hockey sticks are removed, silver spoons taken from mouths and Blytonesque secret passages proven not as desperately essential as one might fear, there is a decent, relevant and no less than important story to be had. This covers just what you might expect from a wartime story from our modern age – mention of anti-Semitism, a glimpse at the appeal Hitler might have had to certain people, and so on, as well as of course a high-stakes drama that should be relatable.
And I say should for a reason. For all I know, and for all those asinine surveys in dodgy tabloids tell me, the youth of today don't know nearly a per cent of what they should about WW2, Nazism, Fascism before and since, and so on. And this makes this both a welcome look at that sort of thing, and yet a distraction from the truth of the matter – the truth that could have come out with a book about the real thing, the Mitfords. I was left feeling their complete absence from things, and the way the story fictionalises everything while avoiding real life examples was a missed opportunity.
And with all instances of the real world removed from these pages, I ended up feeling the novel was up to something else. For too many of the people are horrid here, and I would even include snootsome Sidney in that list of people who lacked my empathy. In making the upper class so evil, and Nancy and her colleagues so wholesome, there seems to be some political point being made here in ways I found unsubtle and unwelcome. The baddies here dislike democracy, and want Hitler to come along and disenfranchise the poor. I mean, was that the Final Solution? No. It's an extrapolation from some opinions, and arguably not the prime point in having Hitler featured in your novel's background. And for all the benefits of Sidney's twists and invention, we get a Trump-styled unsubtlety that I still don't think Mitford veracity would have allowed for.
All told this is not an oh my giddy aunt! failure, but neither it is the success that exclamation might have been inspired by. I must still thank the publishers for my review copy.
Evie's Ghost by the same author seems more able to teach as well as entertain. Cosima Unfortunate Steals a Star by Laura Noakes has other girls both trapped by and needing to avoid the wickedness of the outside world.
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