My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came across the Puffin edition of this recently and was intrigued, not only at the promise of finally reading Beau Geste after seeing the film, the fact that this copy had been given as a birthday present for “darling Pia” from their “Grampy” which I adore entirely, but also in how the foreword to this spoke of how it had been edited. As they write: the original text included “elements in his writing which would, in one way or another, be jarringly out of date today. These elements have been excluded, and the book has been cut down a more manageable size, without losing any of its merits”. So this is not the original text but rather an abridged edition and although I can’t comment on what’s been taken away, I can tell you that this is a pacy well judged thing. It reads sharply and honestly and very nicely throughout.

So, Beau Geste. It’s perhaps the most Boys Own of the Boys Own, the king of Good Eggs and Noble deeds: it weds a country house mystery with a French Foreign Legion adventure and it’s kind of fabulously done throughout. It works, enormously well. Wren has a beguiling honesty to his writing and you believe even the most fantastical of moments because it all rings true. The scenes are rendered clearly and cleanly and never with a wry look towards the reader. This is the world. These are the people. And because this is all done with a deeply delicious sense of realism throughout, it works. So well.

I was trying to figure out how it might sit for modern young readers now. There are books from this period which translate well in terms of themes and others which don’t, books which read well from a contemporary perspective and others which don’t. I think that Beau Geste, despite the odd sticky moment (and despite its moments of strong and vividly rendered violence) still does have an enormous sense of appeal. It’s told with great style and verve and illustrates not only a way of writing but also an area of history which isn’t really articulated in this manner in contemporary children’s fiction. There’s rights and wrongs to this of course, and a much clearer sentence beckoning to be written but I just! can’t! find! it!, but there’s something deeply appealing here in this story of derring do and family loyalties and fraternal nobility and how it transcends some of the limits of the time.

A sharp, punchy, story with a beguilingly honest, heartfelt air.

(look at that for a precis! hopefully it makes up for the previous paragraph’s obfuscatory air!)

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If you’d like to purchase a copy of Beau Geste, then you can do so via this Bookshop.Org affiliate link and that means that you support this website’s costs and my ability to keep writing reviews! And on that note, if you’d like to read more reviews of Boys Own style adventures, why not have a look at (the very excellent!) Battler Britton or Biggles Defends The Desert by Captain W E Johns.