20 saturday review Saturday December 18 2021 | the timesI
f I want to make my sister cry, I know
just how to do it. I look up from my
book and say, into the comfortable
silence: “Boy, why are you crying?”
These are the first words Wendy
Darling says to Peter Pan while he sits on
her bedroom floor, uselessly rubbing soap
on the soles of his feet to try to stick his
shadow back on. “How like a boy,” Wendy
thinks, to use soap.
Peter Pan is our greatest and strangest
children’s story. More than a century after
its publication, it’s still a book worth steal-
ing. Let the record show that in the copy of
Peter Pan I received for my christening my
grandmother inscribed a note to me say-
ing that she hoped I would enjoy it as much
as she did. On the next page, beneath the
words “This book belongs to”, my sister
carefully but firmly wrote her own name.the neck, can block a flying arrow; that all
children, except one, grow up and that to
die will be an awfully big adventure.
The book, like its hero, is carefree and
heartless. It hung around the neck of the
Llewelyn Davies boys like a thimbleful of
novichok. The middle one, Peter himself,
called it “that terrible masterpiece”. Its
author was once the most successful writer
in the country. Now his reputation has
been entirely gobbled up by the story of the
boy who stays young forever.
And then there is the curious business of
forgetting, of which there are two kinds in
Peter Pan. On returning from Neverland,
Peter promises to return for Wendy next
year. When he finally comes back, he finds
that she is a grown woman with children of
her own. She has forgotten how to fly. She
has forgotten how to be young. As she talks
to him, something inside her cries out:
“Woman, woman, let go of me.”
The difference is this: Peter will forget
that he has forgotten. Wendy will always re-
member — as will her daughter, who wakes
that night to find a strange figure sitting on
her floor and sits up to ask: “Boy, why are
you crying?” It’s a very good question.So much of Peter Pan is about the pres-
ence and absence of mothers. Wendy’s
mother, Mrs Darling, is introduced with
this description: “Her sweet mocking
mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could
never get, though there it was, perfectly
conspicuous in the right-hand corner.”
The present rage in children’s litera-
ture is for stories that are morally edi-
fying. In this sense Peter Pan certainly
falls short. The depiction of the
pirates is not unsympathetic. Peter’s
colonisation of Neverland is scarcely
acknowledged, and in Wendy and
Tinkerbell the narrative reproduces
a binary that perceives women as
either a make-believe child-mother
or a sexually aggressive fairy.
Even so, any child will learn a lot from
Peter Pan. They will discover that shad-
ows can only be sewn back on, not stuck
with soap; that fairies are born when
babies laugh; that a grown-up dies every
time you breathe in Neverland, so hyper-
ventilate if you want to kill lots quickly;
that the doors of mermaids’ houses have
little bells, which ring when they open and
close; that a kiss, worn on a string aroundWhen JM Barrie first told the five
Llewelyn Davies boys a story about a boy
who never grew up, he couldn’t have known
that he would be rewriting it for nearly the
rest of his life. The tale began as a series of
stories and games. It was published, refor-
matted and opened as a pantomime that
became an instant Christmas classic. In
1911 it emerged in its final form, Peter
and Wendy, now better known as Pe-
ter Pan. It is a masterpiece of careful
English prose and inside-out Ed-
wardian imagination.
One night when their parents
are out and their nurse, Nana, a
Newfoundland dog, is chained up in
the yard, Peter Pan flies through the
children’s bedroom window. With the
help of the vampish fairy Tinkerbell,
he flies Wendy and her two little broth-
ers to Neverland, where they meet the Lost
Boys. Wendy becomes the troupe’s mother
and makes them take their medicine
between flirtations with mermaids and,
crucially, a series of fights with a group of
pirates, led by James Hook Esq, who de-
cide to kidnap Wendy and make her their
mother. Just your normal sort of plot, then.Rereading Peter Pan by JM Barrie
The strangest of all
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andpan’s people The 1953
Disney adaptationever, that Zach is in the hands of a convict-
ed paedophile. What is compelling about
The Quiet People is neither its neat twists
nor the topical examination of mob rule,
but Cleave’s portrait of Cameron as he goes
rogue under pressure and tries to use his
writer’s skills to save his son. Worth a shout.Hide by Nell Pattison
Avon, 368pp: £7.99
Nothing says Christmas like a Boxing Day
ramble with a side order of murder.
Among a group of seven nature lovers ex-
ploring an isolated snowy nature reserve
in Lincolnshire during the festive season
are Lauren and her deaf sister, Emily. Fos-
tered as children, they have recently been
reunited, although not all is sweetness and
light between them. Others in the gang, of
course, have their own secrets, including
fusty twitcher Alec, who may know a few
of them. It’s not long before he’s found shot
dead and the surviving six need to decide
whether it’s better to stay together with a
killer in their midst or strike out for safety
alone.
There’s a touch of Agatha Christie to
Hide, and if Nell Pattison’s writing doesn’t
always give life to the individual voices of
the characters, her humour is crisp and
even and the plotting as keen as an axe in
the skull. Perfect for your mother-in-law.homages to classics of the spy genre. Vine,
for instance, although rather more cere-
bral than James Bond, lives — as 007 did
— in Wellington Square, Chelsea.
It takes him time to get into gear but
Richardson has fun sending Vine along a
trail that runs through the London Library
and the Special Forces Club. However, the
writing has yet to gain the necessary
authority and the notion that Vine might
work out the identity of the traitor from
perfunctory interviews is unconvincing.
There are some intriguing ideas here, at
times well realised, but The Insider feels like
apprentice work. Tinker tailor soldier spad.The Quiet People by Paul Cleave
Orenda, 300pp; £8.99
Cameron and Lisa, a New Zealand couple,
write crime novels together. These have
done well, even if sales have dipped of late.
Then one night their young son, Zach, who
may be autistic and can be a bit of a hand-
ful, vanishes from his bedroom after
threatening to run away. Evidence leads
the police to become unsure that he has
been kidnapped as first thought, and the
media turns on Cameron. Old interviews
about committing the perfect crime are
dragged up and footage emerges of him
losing his rag with his son at a park.
The reader knows from the start, how-Where God Does Not Walk
by Luke McCallin
No Exit, 448pp; £18.99
Luke McCallin’s stylishly written thrillers
about Gregor Reinhardt, a German intelli-
gence officer, have previously been set
during the Second World War, notably in
the Balkans. In Where God Does Not Walk,
Reinhardt is taken back 25 years to his days
as a callow lieutenant in the German tren-
ches on the Western Front.
When a blast kills several well-connected
officers at a mysterious meeting in a farm-
house, one of Reinhardt’s men is suspected
of being the saboteur. Yet as Reinhardt
looks deeper, it becomes clear that, with
the war’s end near, there are plans to blame
defeat on a “stab in the back” by those who
may come to power if the Kaiser’s regime
falls. Witnesses begin to disappear as Rein-
hardt visits a château where soldiers are
being treated for shell shock, and stub-
bornly tracks down Russian deserters.
Like the conflict, his progress is at times
a bit of a slog. However, shifting the action
to Berlin and then the final Battle of Am-
iens makes the most of the unusual setting,
and McCallin’s literary flair and depiction
of camaraderie in war render this a novel
with a decided touch of substance.The Insider by Matthew Richardson
Penguin, 352pp; £8.99
Solomon Vine, former head of counter-
espionage at MI6, has been sidelined after
the events of Matthew Richardson’s debut,
My Name Is Nobody. Yet after an ex-
oligarch is murdered in London, he’s called
back into the fray to uncover the Russian
mole among four high-flyers about to
reach the top in Whitehall. So far, so John
le Carré, and indeed, for a young writer
there are a perhaps surprising number ofViolent night —
holiday thrills
Black Run by DL Marshall
Canelo, 400pp; £8.99
From the moment John Tyler’s speeding
car hurtles off the opening pages and on to
the quays of La Rochelle, Black Run grabs
the attention like a fire alarm and never lets
up. Taking its cue from the novels of Alistair
MacLean, but updated for the age of the
action hero Jason Statham, it pits gunsling-
er Tyler against a gang of neo-fascists
whose leader he has nabbed in the Alps.
What makes DL Marshall’s sequel to
Anthrax Island stand out from the present
crowd of ask-questions-later hardmen is
his smartly observed use of settings. Black
Run cuts between Tyler’s stake-out for the
extraordinary rendition in the icy moun-
tains and the subsequent pursuit by land
and sea. His plan is to smuggle his target
back to Britain via a rust-bucket freighter,
but the crew can’t be trusted and there’s
stormy weather in the Bay of Biscay.
With the bad guys closing in as well,
soon there’s double-crossing galore on the
ocean wave, not least as the physically and
psychically damaged Tyler has his own
hidden agenda. Yet while the confronta-
tions are near video-game relentless, Mar-
shall confidently incorporates sufficient
ingenuity and off-piste wit to temper the
high body count. Fresh powder.James Owen’s choices
feature fascists in the
Alps, treachery in the
trenches and a Bond/
le Carré mash-up
books
thrillers
Book
of the
monthBlack Run
grabs the
attention like
a fire alarm
and never
lets up