The Land of Far-Beyond

This novel, published in 1942, is “a kind of new Pilgrim's Progress” for children. Its central characters are three siblings living in the City of Turmoil. There they meet a missionary stranger called Wanderer and he shows them the burdens “of all the ugly things you have said and done and thought in your life”. The burdens appear on the back of each child and Wanderer explains “they can only lose them by going to the Land of Far-Beyond, through difficult ways and hard paths.” The three children, Peter, Anna and Patience, leave on their pilgrimage with two other children, John and Lily, and five adults. During the journey, their companions one by one surrender to the hardships along the way but the three children persevere.

The author, Enid Blyton (born 11 August 1897), grew up in London. She finished school in 1915 and began training as a primary school teacher in 1916. One of her brothers, Hanly, fought in the First World War with the Machine Gun Corps and survived. She qualified in 1918 and began writing in 1920. Her first book, a collection of poems, was published in 1922. She married in 1924 and soon became prolific in writing plays and story books. By the 1940s she could see the value of writing a whole series of books featuring the same characters, the Famous Five, for example, first appearing in the same year as this book. The success of the vast majority of her books was enhanced by the use of gifted illustrators, such as Eileen Roper and Horace Knowles, whose drawings appear in this book.


Beyond its moral emphasis, this book is significant for its teaching about fear and courage to children living through the violence of the Second World War. At an early stage in the journey, one of the adults, called Mr Fearful, refuses to cross the River Trouble at the Ford of Determination:
“He wept bitterly as he saw the others going off towards the hill in the distance. But he was much too afraid to go across the river by himself.”
Later another adult, Dick Cowardly, flees at the sight of a group of soldiers guarding the road ahead of them:
“I daren't stay here to face those soldiers. We shall be cut to pieces! We shall be taken prisoner!... I want to go back home. I daren't face any more dangers. Better to be safe in the City of Turmoil with this load on my shoulders than cut to pieces by fierce soldiers!”
The soldiers are in fact guarding the House of Peace and Peter realises Dick Cowardly’s mistake:
“Poor Dick Cowardly. He could easily have stayed and gone with us. If only he had had a little more courage and had kept with us.”

On the other hand, the children meet a character called Courage, “a stout, smiling youth”, who was “big and strong” and “his mouth was determined.” He helps them to rescue their travelling companions who have been imprisoned in the dungeons of the Castle of Desolation. The young readers are shown that virtues, such as courage, honesty, mercy, patience and truth, led the children from turmoil through many dangers to a place of contentment. This was, no doubt, important for building character in children growing up during the war.

Voyage to Kazohinia

This impressive satirical novel, written in 1935 and published in 1941, has Lemuel Gulliver shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean during the 1930s and details his experiences in the isolated country of Kazohinia. The narrator has much the same tone as the original character in Gulliver’s Travels. He describes the two kinds of people living in that country: the Hins, an advanced society without culture, finance, love, politics, patriotism or war, and the Behins, a ghettoised chaotic population that live according to the subversion of reason.

The author, Sándor Szathmári (born 19 June 1897), was the son of a Hapsburg state official and his upbringing involved frequent relocation to different parts of the empire. His delicate health prevented him from serving in the war and instead he was living in poverty in Budapest while studying engineering in the city’s Technical University. As a student he began writing, being influenced by the writer Frigyes Karinthy, who himself wrote a sequel to Gulliver's Travels, in his case called Voyage to Faremido (1916). He began writing novels in 1930 and this, his magnum opus, was published with a dedication to Karinthy. Much of his subsequent literary output was written in Esperanto and he’s regarded as one of the few Esperantist literary figures worthy of wider attention.

The outset of Gulliver’s adventures in 1935 has Britain facing the probability of having to wage a war with Italy over Abyssinia. Gulliver, an officer in the Royal Navy, is aboard H.M.S. Invincible bound for Shanghai (to protect Britain’s interests in the Far East) when it is sunk by a torpedo and he survives with the aid of a lifebelt. He is well received in Kazohinia, an island country where everything is expected to be kazo (rational), the name of the country meaning “the land of those who know the pure reality of human existence”. He is taught about kazo by Zatamon, a Hin, and he in turn tries to explain European society and its values. There is a huge gap in understanding between the two. Zatamon is critical of every aspect of European society. For example:
“Though your kings travel by coaches of gold and wear robes of state heavy with all kinds of jewels (which are of course unnecessary), they still don't permit the people to use their remaining energy for the benefit of their own physical well-being but force them to build a pyramid for themselves or wage war to reduce other peoples to destitution as well.”
When Gulliver despairs at the sterility of the Hin way of life, he decides to enter the settlement of the Behins (those who do not live with reference to reason but subvert what is rational). The Behins are divided into two warring factions that regularly slaughter each other even though their disagreement is entirely nonsensical and concerned with emblems. Whereas much of Hin society are utopian and the Behin settlement dystopian, the picture is not black and white — Gulliver draws some comfort from aspects of Behin life and is tormented by aspects of Hin life.

The pinnacle of the satire comes at the end of the novel when Gulliver has fled Kazohinia and is rescued by a Royal Navy battleship. The admiral of the ship makes a patriotic speech, echoing the Behin obsession with symbols and confirming the Hin suspicion of the senselessness of European politics and culture:
“Respect for military values and the national ideal is the source of life of the people, without which our fate would be death and ruin... For the time being we don't know whether the war to come will be fought against the Germans, the French or the Japanese but wherever we shall be called by His Majesty’s order we shall hasten without thought or hesitation to defend the flag, that much is certain.
I firmly believe that when the bugle call is heard, every citizen, regardless of sex and age, will be happy to sacrifice his or her life for these ideals and the flag, for even if all of us should die, Great Britain and her ideals will live forever!”

Call it Courage

This novel, published in 1940, was awarded the American Literary Association’s Newbery Medal as “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” in that year. Set in the South Pacific "many years... before the traders and missionaries first came”, its central character is Mafatu, an adolescent boy, who is terrified of the sea having been at sea with his mother in a storm in which she died. He lives on the atoll of Hikueru in the Tuamotu Archipelago and is the son of Tavana Nui, the great chief of the island community. Mocked by his peers for his timidity, he resolves to change his reputation; “he must prove his courage to himself, and to the others, or he could no longer live in their midst” and so with his pet dog he sets out in a canoe to conquer his fear of the ocean.

The author, Armstrong Sperry (born 7 November 1897), grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. He was a student at the Yale School of Art when he was drafted to serve in the Navy in September 1918. After the war, he spent several years travelling around Polynesia, assisting with ethnological research and practising art. His first children's book, complete with his own illustrations, was published in 1933. Almost all of his stories were written with an ethnographic focus. He also was a prolific illustrator of children’s books by other authors, including William Standish Stone’s Teri Taro from Bora Bora, set in the same region of Polynesia as Call it Courage.

Soon after Mafatu sets off on his adventure, he faces a severe storm in which he loses the mast and sail. An ocean current carries his canoe to a small island before his boat is destroyed on the reef. He makes it to shore and sets about the tasks of survival (finding food, making fire, building a shelter, constructing a dugout canoe). During his time on the island, he kills a shark and a wild boar. When the otherwise uninhabited island island is visited by fierce cannibals, he flees in his new canoe with the warriors in hot pursuit. As a strong swimmer nears the boat, Mafatu shows fighting courage to resist his attack:
“The boy lifted the paddle and cracked it down... With a groan the man dropped back into the water.”
When after a long journey he returns to his home island, his father does not recognise him. Like a returning soldier, he “staggered up the beach... wasted and thin” and greeted Tava Nui as “father”. The chief is astonished that “this brave figure, so thin and straight, with the fine necklace [of boar’s teeth] and the flashing spear and courage blazing from his eyes” is his son come home from the sea.

Mars in Aries

This novel, written between December 1939 and February 1940 and published as The Blue Hour in 1941, was suppressed by the Nazis and reissued in 1947. The early chapters of the novel are set in Vienna in the weeks before the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The central character, Wallmoden, is an officer awaiting the order to invade and keeps himself occupied by pursuing a romance with a mysterious woman. The novel is significant for its hinting at the existence of an organised Austrian resistance movement at the time of the invasion.

The author, Alexander Lernet-Holenia (born 21 October 1897), had a place in the University of Vienna to study law but volunteered for the army in September 1915. During the war he began writing poetry and became a protégé of Rainer Maria Rilke. His first book of poetry was published in 1921, his first play in 1926 and his first novel in 1931. His 1934 novel, The Standard, was set during Austria-Hungary’s collapse in the First World War. He took part in the invasion of Poland in September 1939 but became a dissident later in the war. He went on to write several widely-acclaimed novels and was awarded the State Prize for Literature in 1961 for his body of work.

The central character, Count Wallmoden, is, like the author, a veteran of the First World War. During the invasion he comes to a place where he had previously been as a soldier and recalls:
“From here... from here I went to the field for the first time. We had spent several months garrisoned in the city. It was here, where we got into the train, here at this point. I was 18 years old then, or a little more. There were four of us and we had a wagon with our horses with us. I still know the names of the people that bid us farewell. I remember their faces. I still know almost all of the words that they said. It seems to me as though it were yesterday. It wasn't that long ago. It must have been about 23 years.”

Delilah

This novel, published in 1941, is set on the seas around the Philippines during the First World War. The author presumably intended the central character to be U.S.S. Delilah rather than the numerous lively characters serving aboard the ship. The scenes in the novel are informed by the author's own experience as an officer on a similar ship in the same time and place. Even before the declaration of war by the United States, the crew face many dangers in their work and experience casualties due to events such as explosions and shark attacks.

The author, Marcus Goodrich (born 28 November 1897), grew up in Texas. He left school to served in the Texas National Guard on the Mexican border. He then joined the Navy. He served on the U.S.S. Chauncey, part of the Asiatic fleet operating in the seas around China and the Philippines. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the Chauncey was sent to Europe for convoy escort duty. The author was one of 70 survivors of the accidental sinking of the ship in November 1917 near Gibraltar. He received a publishing contract for this novel in 1932 and worked successfully as a screenwriter before the novel finally appeared in 1941. He subsequently was again on active duty in the Navy during the Second World War.

One of the officers on the U.S.S. Delilah, Warrington, prepares for the declaration of war by reading of the events in Europe:
“In these lax, latter days he had gotten so absorbed, so indignantly absorbed, in magazine and newspaper accounts of the havoc being wrought by the Germans in Europe that he had been swept out of his reading routine into a feverish wallowing in the atrocity columns of all the publications that he could buy ashore or that came in the mail to the men on the ship. He seemed to have forgotten his books... in order to torture himself with nothing but the reading of every reported rape, every destroyed cathedral, every executed civilian as if each were a personal affront of his own human dignity.”
When war was finally declared, the crew’s response was somewhat impassive:
“They understood the declaration, most of them, simply in the sense that now, one way or another, there had become part of their daily work a fabulous chaos blazing somewhere half-a-world away, amidst still other scenes and peoples their eyes had not looked upon before.”