A Literary Itch Scratched

This evening I will (provided the technology works) have a session with the Air Cadets about reading, arising from thinking about what people are doing with their time under the current restrictions. In fact I am somewhat mortified by the fact that I do no more reading than I ever did though I would quite like to, and certainly not reading improving and challenging works. Instead one of the books I've chased down has been John Gordon's 1968 children's fantasy novel The Giant Under the Snow which has haunted me ever since I was a child but which I never actually read. The haunting quality has much to do with Anthony Maitland's amazing book cover which echoes that other baleful image that I felt stared at me out of the past, the Sutton Hoo helmet. 

As it turns out, The Giant isn't the most dazzling example of its genre. Its virtues and flaws are mirror-image of each other. On the one hand it proceeds with breathless excitement; on the other its brevity means it skates over background and detail and much of it is quite sketchy. Its achievement lies in atmosphere - the snowbound wood just outside a frosty city which is never named but is clearly Norwich, more by hint and suggestion than description. 

There are a surprising number of children's fantasy books set in snowy winter landscapes: not only The Giant Under the Snow, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Box of Delights, and possibly the best of them all, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. Snow means isolation, the suspension of the normal outlines of daily life, visual and existential starkness. Come up with an idea you can locate in those surroundings, and half your battle is won.