I wish Antonia Forest would write more books. I'm not alone in that, either — a whole bunch of people exist who would line up at her door and beg her for more if they knew where she lived — or even who she is (Antonia Forest being a pseudonym). The ironic thing is that apparently she has a book partly in progress — but it's been in progress for years now, and is unlikely to finish.

So, why is she a favourite author of mine? Why was it that after reading just one book of hers (Autumn Term) I knew I must read more — even though I was reading it way past the usual time for such things (it's a school story and I was several years out of school — and even of university).

I'm a sucker for school stories, don't quite know entirely why. I say a sucker — I don't now go round re-reading the Blyton St Clare's books (though I re-read them enough when I was young for several lifetimes), but the idea of setting a book at school, at boarding school, where there's so much life compacted into one small place, no-one able to escape, and the stories can't be as expansive as science fiction or mysteries where anything can happen (kids kidnapped, escaping captors through strange powers or the training of their detective parents, who knows). It's a great setting for stories. Even more so if you know how much actually happens at these places — the most bizarre features planned by favourite authors can seem plausible as a result (for the short length of a book).

Antonia Forest doesn't demand belief and plausibility — she builds it up. All her characters are real and have their own power, their own characteristics, their failings and magnetism as appropriate. The main characters are the Marlow family (twins Nicola and Lawrie are the youngest, then Peter, Ginty, Ann, Rowan and Karen — who's Head Girl when the first book starts — and Giles, the oldest and supposedly wisest, who's away in the Navy most of the time). As usual in kidlit, the parents don't get a huge look-in, though we at least know the mother's name (Pam) and that she eloped with the father at a rather under-age time.

Ahem. Anyhow. Yes, traditional large family, twins, boarding school (Kingscote School), and yet it feels rather different to usual school stories — for one thing, the hatred between certain school 'friends' is in some cases random as in real schools — picking on the one who just happens to be unfortunately pick-on-able (in this case, Marie Dobson; in my school, Laura Blackburn, and I thanked my lucky stars it wasn't me — or mostly not me). The incidents during the school term are as small, or as large, as they would seem to the real protagonists. Most amusingly, the use of language is inventive and reflecting the fact that although Forest can hardly expect to be up to date in the use of the latest school slang, she gives that impression — by making you feel like Nicky, particularly, leads the pack in inventing slang and having it adopted, rather than hinting that the slang may in fact be the reverse — outdated or invented by some old git.

Impressively, Forest extends her spell outside the milieu of the school story — she takes the characters, or at least the family, into non-school stories, set in the holidays. The first one is actually set before the first school story (The Marlows and the Traitor, a fairly straightforward spy-defeated-by-children type story) but following on from that they all interleave with the Kingscote School settings, enhancing and deepening them. Nicky and Peter's friend Patrick becomes a cause for a never-fully-articulated rivalry between Nicky and Ginty — Ginty who is nearer Patrick's age, and gorgeous — Nicky who is much more similar to Patrick than is Ginty, and furious at having her friend taken away even as she wonders if she really still thinks of him as just a friend.

Unfortunately, most of Forest's books are out of print. Autumn Term has been reprinted by Faber, with a gorgeous pencil drawing cover, and we hope to see more reissued. The holy grail of a new Marlows book, however, seems unlikely ever to be seen.

15/03/2003