Battlefields

'Do not be troubled, God, though they say "mine" of all thing that permit it patiently. They are like wind that lightly strokes the boughs and says MY tree.' (Rainer Maria Rilke) It is Captain Packham's obsession with owning all around him - house, land, estate workers - which leads to a paralysing accident witnessed only by Jerry, whose father is in Packham's employ. This incident is the climax of a book whose undoubted strength centres on the enormously appealing characters of Jerry and his dog, Roly. Colonel Packham's house, Battlefields, is named after the site of a Civil War conflict. It gives the book its title, the reader an indication of the open hostility between Jerry and Packham and demonstrates that principles cannot always be overriden by cruelty, however pathological its nature. We own nothing; everything is merely 'put here for us to take care of and pass on'. Thoreau is alive, well and living in Battlefields. Third-years - probably boys - would find this stimulatingly different, often engagingly humorous and, incidentally, a suitable companion to Susan Hill's I'm the King of the Castle for its themes of cruelty and persecution.