The Far Distant Oxus

This book was written in secret by two schoolgirls in the 1930s and sent to Arthur Ransome, who liked it and got it published. It became quite successful and was followed by two sequels before the Second World War intervened.

It's about children's adventures with ponies on Exmoor, and naturally it's dated by now, like Ransome's own books. However, it's very competently written (well up to the standards of adult writers for children) and makes quite a pleasant read if you like that kind of thing.

Although Ransome was clearly impressed with it (he wrote a very generous introduction), in several respects it doesn't really match him at his best.

1. There's a whole series of adventures in the book, but the authors manage to make the adventures seem easy: they don't have Ransome's knack of making a drama out of a small adventure. Thus, I reach the end of the book feeling inaccurately that nothing much happened.

2. The main characters are not very well distinguished from each other, so they seem almost interchangeable; apart from the mysterious Maurice, the very capable boy of unknown origins, who functions as the hero.

3. In a class-conscious society in which money must have had its usual importance, Ransome managed to write books in which the main characters rarely used money at all, and people of different classes mixed with each other amicably and unselfconsciously. Hull and Whitlock painted society more as they saw it: their young characters feel apart from and somewhat superior to the lower classes, they have money and they spend it as necessary, though without extravagance.

It's worth mentioning (possibly as an advantage) that Hull and Whitlock's characters are a bit wilder than Ransome's. Ransome wrote as an adult and wanted his children to be adventurous, but basically well-behaved and responsible, from an adult point of view. Hull and Whitlock were close in age to their characters and didn't yet have the adult point of view.

Thus, Ransome's characters worry about what their parents would think of their behaviour, even when the parents are far away. The Hull and Whitlock characters take a more practical view: adult approval matters only if adults find out what you've been doing. This is how children actually think, rather than how parents wish them to think.

Ransome's characters never drink alcohol; Hull and Whitlock's are offered farm cider (which can have an alcohol content similar to wine) and knock it back as though it's not the first time.

However, Hull and Whitlock's characters are like Ransome's in one respect: although some of them are in their teens, they remain children. In the 1930s, the teenager had apparently not been invented.

(This review was written in 2011)