A review by nwhyte
The Guardians by John Christopher

http://nhw.livejournal.com/907874.html[return][return]Rather an interesting book. The narrator, Rob Randall, is brought up in the Conurb, the massive urban settlement in the future south-eastern England; he flees a grim boarding school to the County, the rural area where the rich people live, and manages to get adopted by a gentry family. But some among the younger generation believe that the system is rotten and must be smashed.[return][return]It must be twenty years since I read any of Christopher's books, and I'd forgotten how good he is. Three-quarters of the way through I began wondering when the actual plot was going to start; and then within a few pages I realised that it had been unfolding all around me without being obtrusive; that the description of the society and how it is controlled actually is the plot, as much in the telling as in what we are being told. Likewise, his understated prose leaves us to infer the narrator's feelings about the deaths of his parents, and his divided loyalties to his new family in the County, but also leaves us in little doubt about either.