Welcome to the Book Log where you will now find, amongst other things:
Reviews of Books I have enjoyed
Notes on My Current Ideas and Projects
Some thoughts on How I Write


A FAVOURITE BOOKSHOP OF MINE (WHERE I ORDERED BURMA BOY BY BIYI BANDELE) AND A LIBRARY THAT NO LONGER EXISTS (WHERE I ONCE READ A BOOK CALLED THE WAR)

Ever since my first book, THE MEMORY PRISONER, was published in 2000, The Bargain Bookshop in Station Road has played host to a signing to help launch each of my titles. North Chingford is where I grew up, though the Bargain Bookshop hadn’t yet opened when I left home. My parents, however, became regular customers. Beverly Tankard, who runs the shop, has been very supportive over the years, and all the staff members are knowledgeable, pleasant and always helpful. The shop is small and packed with books from floor to ceiling. Any book they don’t have on the shelves they will order for you, and it usually arrives within a week.

I bought a book there a couple of weeks ago. BURMA BOY by Biyi Bandele. Although the main character is a fourteen-year-old boy, BURMA BOY is not written as a children’s book (that’s not to say that young people wouldn’t be interested in it, of course). It’s about a group of West African volunteers fighting with the Chindits – an elite long-range jungle penetration force – against the Japanese army in Burma during the Second World War. It follows the trail of an underage volunteer as he is swept into the heart of the action and faces the brutality of jungle warfare. As well as exploring a somewhat neglected area of Second World War history, BURMA BOY is also a story rich in the details of spoken language. The Chindits were very much an international force, including allied soldiers from Europe, America, Australia, Africa and Asia. The cross-mingling of different languages was an inevitable result. Amongst the Africans, there was a form of modified English that was used by the troops as a common military language. For instance, a soldier is called a sojar, while a general is referred to as a janar. In the case of Wingate, the charismatic leader of the Chindits, he was known as the janar. A lieutenant is called a laftanam, a captain a kyaftin, and so on. A sergeant-major is called a samanja, as indeed is an ordinary sergeant. When asked why they make no distinction between these two ranks the sojars say “All sarmanjas are sarmanjas!” This reply typifies the combination of respect and benign disregard generally shown towards the nuances of British military hierarchy. The ending of the book is hard-hitting; the narrative structure is modelled on the random qualities of real events. Nobody in the story gets an ending you could predict.

As I mentioned in the blog entry below, entitled BOMBER BOYS, I have long been fascinated with reading histories and first hand accounts of the World Wars. I have often felt rather guilty about this. There’s something a bit odd about seeking out and reading stories of these terrible events. I’ve never been able to work out exactly why I have this fascination. Now I just have to shrug my shoulders and admit to it. It’s been with me from an early age, that I do know. When I moved from my primary school to the much larger secondary school, I found it, as many people do, a much harsher environment. But one of the good things about Chingford Junior High School (a school that no longer exists - or at least, not in the same form or location) was the fantastic library. I spent many a lunchtime there, reading through their vast collection of folk tales from around the world, or the many books on the Second World War that were housed there. There was one volume I remember in particular, though I’ve never seen it anywhere since. It was a huge book, thick as a dictionary, and was simply called THE WAR. It consisted of hundreds of exerts from other books, all first hand accounts of the conflict of 1939 - 1945, written by the servicemen and civilians that had been involved in or witnessed the events. They were arranged chronologically, and thus mapped out an eye-witness account of the conflict from start to finish. I recall the stark and moving dedication at the front of the book, “To the 37,600,000 who died.” It was here that I first read a description of African soldiers fighting in the jungles of Asia against the Japanese (which is why the title and content of Biyi Bandele’s book caught my eye). It stuck in my mind so deeply that, many years later, I had Adda-Leigh, a character in WORM IN THE BLOOD, relate a story of her African grandfather fighting in the war. I based this snippet partly on the reading I did in the school library when I was twelve.