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Book Review: The Far-Distant Oxus
Jul. 5th, 2022 08:21 amAlthough Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock’s The Far-Distant Oxus has never technically been on one of my reading lists, it is the book that has been on the reading list of my HEART the longest, ever since I read about it in the Market Guide for Young Writers in the days of my youth.
Hull and Whitlock first met at school when they were fourteen and fifteen, when a driving rainstorm forced them to take shelter. I have always envisioned a gazebo, but they may well have sheltered under a tree. Either way it is THE most adorable co-writer meet-cute in the history of forever.
The girls discovered that they had both always longed to write a novel, and set about writing a story about ponies and friendship and children having marvelous adventures without a scrap of adult supervision. Once they finished, they sent it to their favorite author, Arthur Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons series. As The Far-Distant Oxus is exactly the sort of book that Arthur Ransome would have written if he wrote about ponies instead of sailboats, he adored it, helped the girls to get it published, and contributed a glowing afterword.
The book could not possibly live up to the romance of its origin story, but it is pretty good. When the three Hunterley children spend their summer holiday on Exmoor (home of wild ponies!), they quickly befriend the two Cleverton children and a Mysterious Boy named Maurice.
(The first time I tried to read this book - I stumbled on a copy at the University of York - I regret to inform you that I gave up because modern YA novels had trained me that Mysterious Boys always meant romance. Happily, no one falls in love with anyone in this book! It’s friendship and adventure all the way through.)
The six children build a hut with a marvelous treetop library (complete with reading hammocks, and including of course their favorite book Swallows and Amazons), rescue their favorite foal and his mother from the yearly wild pony round-up, and rename all the major sites in Exmoor after places in Matthew Arnold’s poem “Sohrab and Rustum” (based on Ferdowsi’s Persian epic Shahnameh), rather as Ransome’s children come up with romantical nautical names for places they visit.
It’s delightful but mostly episodic, until they realize they are within a few days’ walk of the sea: “We must go down the Oxus and find the sea - I don’t care what anyone says - we must, we must do it,” Bridget exults.
And they do! They build a raft to carry their stores, pack saddlebags onto their ponies, and on their own - untrammeled by a single adult - they follow the river down to the sea, where they spend a day racing their horses on the beach, and then come back up by the country lanes.
By then their summer holiday is almost over, and they mark the end by lighting a beacon atop the tallest hill in Exmoor. Maurice rushes off on his black horse Dragonfly to light a whole chain of beacons along the hills - and then he’s gone!
The book ends with the Mystery of Maurice UNSOLVED so I think I will simply have to read the two sequels, Escape to Persia and The Oxus in Summer.
Hull and Whitlock first met at school when they were fourteen and fifteen, when a driving rainstorm forced them to take shelter. I have always envisioned a gazebo, but they may well have sheltered under a tree. Either way it is THE most adorable co-writer meet-cute in the history of forever.
The girls discovered that they had both always longed to write a novel, and set about writing a story about ponies and friendship and children having marvelous adventures without a scrap of adult supervision. Once they finished, they sent it to their favorite author, Arthur Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons series. As The Far-Distant Oxus is exactly the sort of book that Arthur Ransome would have written if he wrote about ponies instead of sailboats, he adored it, helped the girls to get it published, and contributed a glowing afterword.
The book could not possibly live up to the romance of its origin story, but it is pretty good. When the three Hunterley children spend their summer holiday on Exmoor (home of wild ponies!), they quickly befriend the two Cleverton children and a Mysterious Boy named Maurice.
(The first time I tried to read this book - I stumbled on a copy at the University of York - I regret to inform you that I gave up because modern YA novels had trained me that Mysterious Boys always meant romance. Happily, no one falls in love with anyone in this book! It’s friendship and adventure all the way through.)
The six children build a hut with a marvelous treetop library (complete with reading hammocks, and including of course their favorite book Swallows and Amazons), rescue their favorite foal and his mother from the yearly wild pony round-up, and rename all the major sites in Exmoor after places in Matthew Arnold’s poem “Sohrab and Rustum” (based on Ferdowsi’s Persian epic Shahnameh), rather as Ransome’s children come up with romantical nautical names for places they visit.
It’s delightful but mostly episodic, until they realize they are within a few days’ walk of the sea: “We must go down the Oxus and find the sea - I don’t care what anyone says - we must, we must do it,” Bridget exults.
And they do! They build a raft to carry their stores, pack saddlebags onto their ponies, and on their own - untrammeled by a single adult - they follow the river down to the sea, where they spend a day racing their horses on the beach, and then come back up by the country lanes.
By then their summer holiday is almost over, and they mark the end by lighting a beacon atop the tallest hill in Exmoor. Maurice rushes off on his black horse Dragonfly to light a whole chain of beacons along the hills - and then he’s gone!
The book ends with the Mystery of Maurice UNSOLVED so I think I will simply have to read the two sequels, Escape to Persia and The Oxus in Summer.
