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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Homeward" bound: triumphant return of Uncle..., 22 Aug 2000
By A Customer
At last, the extraordinary tales of Uncle and his irrepressible enemies, the Badfort Crowd, are back in print, and not a moment too soon.If anyone at Random House publishers is reading this, then *please get the other five Uncle books back in print ASAP!* You will delight many adults in their thirties and early forties, and provide great pleasure for their children. I remember discovering Uncle books in my local library in the early 1970s as a child of ten or eleven, and my memories of the books are very strong still, even though I haven't read them since. Who can possibly forget the extraordinarily vivid cast of rogues, cheats, bores and downright strange characters JP Martin created? He coined some of the best comic names in literature - positively Dickensian inventions, including: Jellytussle, Flabskin, Hitmouse and the Muncle, to name just a few. Or the wonderful brands and products - Black Tom and Leper Jack liquor (staple tipple at Badfort), or Koolvat (refreshing cordial served at Homeward, Uncle's skyscraper-towered castle). Quentin Blake's illustrations complement Martin's stories with great energy and sympathy. The most affecting thing about the Uncle books is the way they portray a fully realised world - one not just of fantasy (although that is a strong part of the books' appeal), but also of human and animal life in all its aspects. Read the Uncle stories as a child and you will delight in the narrative; read them as an adult and you will sense the tension between Uncle's self-conscious wish to live up to his role as patrician benefactor, garbed in imperial purple, and the attempts of the Badfort crowd to mimic and deflate him. Martin always contrasts the vast wealth of Uncle with the pressures of poverty and hardship that affect his less fortunate subjects, and shows us teeming populations living hand-to-mouth (like the countless dwarves who populate Homeward). And there are the countless surreal and even Pythonesque touches. Uncle's brother Rudolph is a big-game hunter; there is a supporting cast of worshipful and also "credulous" badgers; Hitmouse and the Hatemans scribble in their "hating books" foul libels about Uncle, typically in retaliation for being kicked up in the air a distance of a mile. It's marvellous to see JP Martin's classic works coming back in to print after years of neglect. Their spell is as strong as ever.
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by J.P. Martin
by J.P. Martin
by Joan Aiken
by Andre Maurois
by Quentin Blake
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