As the magician said, the hand is quicker than all eyes except those of children, and the maxim can also apply to young readers - especially when they are immersed in an historical novel.. No one can spot an anachronism or a coincidence that doesn't work (and it usually doesn't) faster than an eleven year-old authority on the past.
A fictionist must manouevre with Odyssean cunning between the Scylla of wordiness and the Charybdean peril of "writing down" in order to guide the writer's craft into the young reader's sea of satisfaction.
The late Rosemary Sutcliffe had such a skill. An invalid for much of her life, she used her knowledge of ancient history as a sextant and her vivid imagination - nurtures in the Stevensonian cosmos of counterpane - as a guiding star, to navigate through a series of exciting novels about Roman Britain recently reissued by Oxford University Press under the Children's Modern Classics label.
As early as 1954, Rosemary Sutcliffe's Eagle of the Ninth (OUP £5.99 in UK) launched the series. Older readers might recall the BBC's televised version in the fifties of the adventures of the young Roman officer, Marcus Flavius Aquila, and his escapades north of Hadrian's Wall. He is determined to find out what happened to his father, commander of the lost Cohort of the Ninth, who never returned. Foreign officials have always been reluctant to wander into the land of the naked knee, but the intrepid Marcus of the aes triplex tradition dares all to restore the missing eagle standard of the unlucky Ninth and his father's reputation. Today's young readers will be no doubt as eager as ever to face in print Caledonia's considerable hazards in this highly readable, well constructed story.
Using much of Roman Britain as her setting, Rosemary Sutcliff developed three more novel within five years, covering the Romney Marsh area in Outcast (£5.99 in UK), the moving story of Beric, an orphaned Roman child brought among the Celtic tribes; territory from the Thames alley to north of the Humber in The Silver Branch (£5.99 in UK), a secret-agent thriller in which two young Roman officers are pursued down the corridors of power by corrupt forces in a dying empire; and the west count from Chester to Gloucester (but stretching eastward to London ) in the final work which won the coveted Carnegie Medal, The Lantern Bearers(£5.99 in UK).
Roughly covering what were to become the four major dialectal areas of old English, the series begins with Agricola's extension of the Scottish border in the early Second Century AD and ends with the departure of the last Roman legions in the Fifth. That was a time in Britain when constant tribal warfare and periodic foreign invasions caused considerable linguistic transition.
The usage of arhcaisms that suggest Celtic and Latin expression is a heavy challenge, and the dialogue occasionally has an artificial ring. But the novels nonetheless fill an important gap in children's fiction. Britain 's hubristic King Vortigern and Hengest with his Saxon hordes from the northeastern angle of Germany make their appearance in The Lantern Bearers (the stories based upon an genuine archaeological discovery near Silchester).
All of the above are aimed at ten-plus interest age, and the OUP has also reissued Philippa Pearce's Minnow on the Say (£5.99 in UK) for readers of that age. The "Minnow" is a canoe which the young hero, David Moss, comes upon on flooding waters during his holidays. When he locates the owner, Adam Codling, a bot slightly older than himself, the contrast of characters offers a nice twist to a mystery in which the two boys seek a treasure. Others not so attractive are a also treasure hunting, and Philippa Pearce builds up the suspense with a dead-heat climax. She also uses clever slues, although a careful young reader may note that she telegraphs the punch. A great deal of the charm I this story lies in the plausibility of incidents and the author's graphic description of her native Cambridgeshire.
Two other well produced OUP volumes , The Ship That Flew, by Hilda Lewis (£5.99 in UK) and Temmi and the Flying Bears by Stephen Elboz (£5.99 in UK), which aims at nine-plus and eight-plus respectively, are fantasy novels that offer both exciting adventures and the kind if mysterious tension that spark children's marvellous capacity to wonder. If they find these paperbacks on their shelves, they will find excellent summer reading - that is, if they can find any summer.
Chris Stevens, former Irish Times staff writer, is a novelist and university lecturer.