New Communities from the Margins

Although he is among the most gifted of contemporary British writers for adolescents, Leon Garfield has not received ample recognition for his achievements. Now, however, thanks to the comprehensive and insightful monograph by Roni Natov, we can see the great diversity and sophistication of his work produced between 1964 and 1991.

Instead of introducing Garfield through a traditional biographical sketch, Natov begins her book with an interview she conducted with him at his home in Highgate, North London, in June 1989. This is a unique but dangerous approach to an author, because Garfield more or less sets the tone for Natov's interpretation of his work, thus influencing the reader's views of Natov's study. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile gambit, for in the interview Garfield openly reveals the difficulties he experienced as a jew growing up in Brighton during the 1920s and 1930s and recounts with candor familial problems and his years as a war-crimes investigator in Germany during World War II. Moreover, Garfield discusses his social concerns, his great admiration for Shakespeare, and his reasons for writing various books. In all, Garfield provides abundant and fascinating biographical material that enriches Natov's approach, as well as providing other perspectives for readers who might want to view Garfield in a manner different from Natov's.

In the seven chapters that follow, Natov continues to draw on this interview for background material, but she is more interested in how Garfield takes a major theme and explores it in unique ways in such different genres as parody, myth, the historical novel, the fairy tale, and the biblical story. For Natov, Garfield's major protagonists are often fractured individuals, "functioning within or expelled from a dysfunctional family that in turn reflects the larger disjointed world" (x). Regardless of whether Garfield is writing a sea adventure like Jack Holborn (1966), a Dickensian novel of social realism such as Smith (1967), the historical novels The Prisoners of September (1975) and The Blewcoat Boy (1988), or ghost stories such as Mister Corbett's Ghost (1968) and The Ghost Downstairs (1972), Natov demonstrates that throughout he seeks to expose the social and psychological forces that drive people to the margins in order to point to some possibility for salvation. She sees Garfield as a postmodern writer, disturbed by the fragments and fissures in contemporary society, but one whose major project is to use the range of his art to overcome social disparities, injustice, and fragmentation.

Natov explores Garfield's major works in detail, revealing how he creates bonds between such disparate characters as Harris and Bostock, in The Strange Affair of Adelaide Davis (1971) and Bostock and Harris; or, the Night of the Comet (1979), in order to suggest the need for community and the restoration of justice. Through these bonds one may hope to offset the cruel indifference of a materialistic society that often leads to the exploitation and abandonment of children. The theme of hope emerges strongly in his rewriting of Greek myths, as in The Golden Shadow (1973), and in his revisionings of Bible stories like The King in the Garden (1984), as well as in his uncanny fairy tales such as Guilt and Gingerbread (1984) and The Wedding Ghost (1985). In all these works, Natov maintains, reality is heightened to create an intensified representation of ordinary life that enables us to understand contemporary social problems in relation to the literary themes he has chosen.

Toward the end of her book Natov suggests that Garfield has his own mythic view of how to bring about the salvation of the individual and society. She argues that "in The Apprentices (1978) and The House of Cards (1982), more than in any of his earlier writing, Garfield works social realism into a moral allegory of a new order. . . . Both books involve a visionary regrouping of basic social units; both evoke a new moral order in which high, middle, and low class can come together to form an expansive community that collapses the old class distinctions" (86). Interestingly, the desire for a new community can...