Sally Gardner, The Silver Blade
Orion £9.99, pp 304 10+
The French Revolution lives on in children’s imaginations, if at all, largely because of The Scarlet Pimpernel. The tale of how a seemingly foppish aristocratic leads a double-life, rescuing other aristocrats from the guillotine has been a perennial favourite. Yet what about all the other innocents, who, in the days of the Terror, could be executed simply for showing pity for the condemned?
Sally Gardner’s sequel to The Red Necklace, The Silver Blade, plunges us into that very question. At the end of the first book, Yann saved his beloved Sidonie and discovered that she loved him, but returned to Paris to rescue his friends while she sailed safely to England. Now known as the Silver Blade, he performs in the theatre by night and by day rescues others from the guillotine, at enormous personal risk. A Romany, Yann can read people’s thoughts, make them forget things and cause objects move by force of concentration. The trouble is that his old enemy and Sido’s, Count Kalliovski, has returned from the dead after making a pact with the Devil. The only man who can walk the streets during the Terror wearing the “decadent symbols of aristocracy”, he is now living in a palace of bones in the Parisian catacombs, accompanied by a monstrous black dog with human eyes. Why does Kalliovski keep waxwork heads, how does he make them talk and what does he want the master key-maker, Quint? All will be revealed.
Gardiner occupies a unique place in children’s literature, which The Silver Blade assures. In 2005 she made the leap from picture books to novels, producing the prize-winning I, Coriander, comparable to both Pan’s Labyrinth and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber in its striking fusion of Puritan political history and gothic fairytale. Here, the influence of Carter is even more pronounced, in that the resonance of traditional fantasy is seamlessly woven into a first-rate suspense novel addressing the deepest issues of the French Revolution, and its “indomitable killing machine...as blind to the innocent as it is to the guilty.”
As in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, the tension between the cruel steel and frail flesh is heightened by ardent love. Sidonie’s reunion with her lover has everything in its way, from class to murder. Yann, “a tightrope-walker over the Valley of Death” is the most appealing hero to appear since Lian Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor, and his magical abilities inevitably set him up for an ultimate trial of strength and will with Sido’s life at stake. With its reversals, surprises, scholarship and dramatic details of an era so soaked in blood that the Seine itself ran red, The Silver Blade is historical fiction at its height. No reader, old or young, could resist its passion, told in crystalline prose and peopled with characters as engaging as the dwarf Tetu, bear-like Didier, the venal Mr. Tull and a terrifying great black dog. It is by far the best British book for children I have read this year.
The French Revolution is steeped in extraordinary real-life stories of tragedy and self-sacrifice, many of which are recast here in the deadly struggle between good and evil. Few British children now get to learn about this period in history, yet it was the parent of all that is best, and worst, about our own times – as the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel manifestly failed to see, but which Gardner does. An utterly enthralling and wholly original novel, The Silver Blade is a must-read for a new generation.