THE ROAD OF BONES (12+)
by Anne Fine
Doubleday, £10.99; 256pp

THE REASONS why classic children’s fiction is so enjoyable is that it is supposed to offer us an escape from reality. Set in a prelapsarian age, children’s novels portray love without sex, battles without bloodshed and politics without compromise. Recently, a number of children’s authors, from Philip Pullman to Meg Rosoff, have pushed at these boundaries with varying degrees of success.

Ursula Le Guin’s position in this particular world is a shifting one. She wrote A Wizard of Earthsea, which is probably my favourite children’s novel and which predated many of the themes of Harry Potter. Two splendid sequels followed; and then a disappointing fourth book (Tehanu), in which the hero, Ged, not only loses his magic but discovers sex. Not surprisingly, her fantasy novels took a turn for the worse. It is not sex but death that is the preoccupation of all great children’s fiction, and authors ignore this at their peril.

Happily, her new series is a lot more interesting. It began with Gifts, the story of a young boy, Orrec, who had to spend a year blindfolded for fear of his magical inheritance of being able to destroy what he looks at. Voices, the sequel, is set about ten years later and told by a young girl, Memer, who is a child of rape. Adopted by the crippled Waylord, Memer has the magical power to open a secret chamber to the library in the Waylord’s house where books are carried for safekeeping, and where the gods wait. Angry, but a brilliant scholar, Memer sees that life in Ansul is about to change once Orrec, now a famous storyteller and poet, arrives to stir up the people against their conquerors, the Ald.

Le Guin’s crystalline prose and her ability to dramatise political and spiritual issues of our time are unequalled. At one level both novels are about teenagers discovering the responsibilities of adulthood, but they are also more intellectually challenging. Just as Islam forbids the depiction of the human form, so the desert religion of the Alds forbids books as “devilry and evil spirits and black magic”. They love poetry, but only in its oral form; and the novel examines our preoccupation with books on many levels. Children will want a lot more magic, but as an allegory about how freedom can be snatched from political oppression, Voices is excellent.

Anne Fine’s The Road of Bones is about corruption and oppression from within. Yuri has learnt to keep a blank face when his parents whisper about politics, but his outspoken grandmother tells him that he is being taught lies. Leader’s faces are razored out of textbooks, people “disappear” to the terrible north and, as Grandmother says: “In this benighted country, you can call no man lucky till he’s dead.”

Before long, Yuri has to leave family and bricklaying after saying too much. He survives, briefly, by helping an elderly couple to mend their roof, gets taken to a communal chicken farm, is sentenced to ten years, escapes and, in the best chapter, narrowly avoids being eaten by fellow prisoners. It is a harsh, bitter world in which people will lie, steal, kill and hoard food from their fellows.

Fine, the former Children’s Laureate, has addressed many contemporary problems, from divorce to bullying, with a robust and engaging wit. This is a departure from form, an angry, biting book about the horrors of the former Soviet Union that will repel and confuse many children. Lacking sufficient plot or moral intelligence, Yuri becomes increasingly heartless, believing like those before him that the end will justify the means. Not, alas, in this case.

What's more

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SIBERIA (11+)
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WHEN HITLER STOLE PINK RABBIT (8+)
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