Five Children on the Western Front: 10th Anniversary Edition
When an author takes the opportunity to write a sequel to a classic such as E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, they must do so with some trepidation. Kate Saunders need not have worried. Five Children on the Western Front is an amazingly well-crafted novel with the central themes of grief and war.
She has cleverly made the older children in Nesbit’s original old enough to be part of the lost generation who died in the First World War. The only question for seasoned readers is: which of them will suffer, and how?
The Psammead returns, we aren’t sure why, but Saunders posits two reasons. One is that the Psammead has committed so many crimes and been responsible for so many selfish acts that his magic has been dimmed until he learns repentance and kindness; the other is that all the Pemberton children including Saunders’ new character, Edie, aged nine, need him because of the advent of war and the loss of the normality they had taken for granted.
The most haunting scenes are twofold. Some in the trenches and two scenes which take place in the 1930s. First when the children visit the future from 1905 and see pictures of themselves but don’t see the two eldest brothers, Robert and Cyril. They don’t know why.
Saunders again visits this theme of childhood innocence in the 1930s, with the final scene which is a skillful drawing together of all the loose ends. It is also a foregrounding of the notion that children in the 1930s had many male relatives they would never know.
In this work, here published in a 10th anniversary edition with a foreword by Children’s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Saunders writes about the theme of grief both collective and personal with almost unparalleled compassion and elegance.
