Amazon.co.uk Review
Mick Jackson's
Five Boys opens with young Bobby being evacuated from a blitzed London to the supposed calm of a small South Devon village. But for Bobby, the eccentrics and eccentricities of his new home are far more dangerous than the German bombs. Billeted with elderly spinster Miss Minter, Bobby soon encounters the village characters--and, identified as a Nazi spy, becomes the latest hapless victim of the local gang, the
Five Boys. In time, though, he's befriended by one of the Five, Aldred, an organist's assistant with an overactive thyroid and a passion for a London he's seen only in books. Together, the Boys (now Six) embark on a series of adventures and pranks, climbing the church tower at night to pelt grave stones with plums, sneaking into the house of the suspiciously semaphoric Captain, and getting mixed up with, and carried off by, the mysterious Pied-Piper-esque Bee King. What starts as a straightforward evacuation story shifts into a series of more or less prankish anecdotes (a funeral for a pig, the invasion of US soldiers) before spiralling into a more disturbing denouement. But despite the hints of lurking tragedy, the author keeps the book light, capturing perfectly the bewildered innocence of his young hero, and of a lost England.
Jackson's debut novel The Underground Man was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Royal Society of Authors' First Novel Award--immediate and well-deserved recognition for Jackson's considerable skills at conscientiously re-imagining the past, but with a dash of pure eccentricity. --Alan Stewart
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Capturing the sweet strangeness of childhood, Mick Jackson's new novel is set against the comic background of a rural Devon village adjusting to World War II. The five boys of the title are initially encountered through the eyes of an East End evacuee, Bobby, an alien creature to them. The boys are a somewhat strange entity too; all born within the same week, they form a unit that is disturbingly indivisible and are left much to themselves until the arrival of the Bee King with his honey, bee lore and strange rituals. Deciding Bobby is the vanguard of the fifth column, they torment him very creatively before suddenly initiating him into their games. Jackson does not romanticise childhood; he ably captures the innocent malevolence of children, their unformed and adaptable natures: the boys' receptivity is what bonds the Bee King to them. Inhabited by quirky comic characters of great invention rather than rural caricatures, the village itself provides much gentle humour provoked by the new necessities of war. There are some excellent set pieces, notably when the villagers bluff their way into the American training area in pursuit of an errant pig and when the GIs are invited to a barn-dance, the jitterbug unleashing an unrestrained frenzy of female energy. As you would expect from a writer who was shortlisted for the Booker for his debut novel, the writing is superb, with an easy humour and well-observed insights. Unfortunately, though, the conclusion is strangely unsatisfying. Bobby disappears without explanation halfway through and the intriguing Bee King, the central character, arrives only in the last quarter of the book. The effect is disjointed and feels unresolved even on the last page, which is a shame because otherwise this is a very entertaining read. (Kirkus UK)
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