2007-06-18 Serious themes underlying a wonderful adventure

Probably the best of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, along with "We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea" and "Great Northern".

Set on the Norfolk Broads, the story follows Dick and Dorothea Callum who, keen to learn how to sail and to study wildlife, go to stay with their mother's friend, Mrs Barrable, on the yacht Teasel. They meet another child, Tom Dudgeon, a serious birdlife conservationist who gets into trouble by setting adrift a motor-cruiser of loud and tactless townies when they refuse to move when their boat which is moored threatening the live nest of a rare family of coots.

We follow Tom, Dick, Dorothea and their friends on an exciting adventure from the northern to the southern broads, very vividly described by the author with a real sense of place and life, purused by the police and the townies and climaxing in boat wrecks. What makes this novel unusual in the series is the conservationist theme and the argument that sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in, and take risks, despite conventional thinking of right and wrong. Highly recommended.

For those who wish to continue the story begun in Coot Club, there is one more chapter in the Swallows and Amazons series called The Big Six, almost as good.