Book Review: The Avion My Uncle Flew
Aug. 15th, 2023 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerGalloping toward the end of the Newbery Honor books of the 1940s! I just finished Cyrus Fisher's The Avion My Uncle Flew, which is a fantastic tour de force, what an amazing book.
The book takes place just after the end of World War II. John's father is still doing post-war work in France; John and his mother go to join him, and then John is sent to stay in his mother's ancestral village of St. Chamant with his uncle Paul Langres ("mon oncle"), who is building an airplane (or rather a glider, as John realizes with chagrin) which he hopes will repair the family fortunes, which hit rock bottom when the Nazis burnt down the ancestral Langres home. But the mayor of the town, who is trying to be the Langres land at rock-bottom prices, keeps interfering with his plans...
This book is many things, and one of them is an exciting thriller, which is not a genre much represented among the Newbery award winners. It's quite tense! When John visits the wreck of the Langres house, he finds a knapsack hanging from one of the intact walls, containing... drumroll please!... a Nazi revolver, showing that a Nazi soldier is still hiding in the mountains!
The mayor refuses to believe it! John decides that the mayor must be convinced! He comes up with what he believes is an excellent plan to convince the mayor: he and his new friend Charles will steal some of the mayor's livestock, dropping a few German coins on the scene to show that it was definitely a Nazi who did it.
Unfortunately, John's French is still quite rudimentary, so when he tries to explain his plan to Charles, it involves a lot of repetition of the words "le maire... cochon... Nazi...", leading Charles to believe that the mayor is a pig of a Nazi. Will he help? "Je suis patriote!" Charles proclaims, to John's great confusion, but hey, as long as Charles is on board!
But when they go to the mayor's house to steal his livestock, they discover that le maire IS in fact a pig of a Nazi! (Or rather a greedy former collaborator, same diff.) The mayor and his Nazi co-conspirators chase the boys into the mountains, where they run for help to Oncle Paul, who is just on the verge of launching his glider when the boys arrive with a trio of Nazis in hot pursuit. Charles' sister Suzette, taking in the scene at a glance, realizes that there is only one way out: she shoves John into the glider and cuts the rope holding it in place, so he can soar down to the valley for help!
The chief Nazi runs after him, shooting at the glider, only to fall off the cliff. Oops! Left with only le maire and a lesser Nazi to deal with, Oncle Paul and Charles and Suzette subdue their captors by the time that John leads the villagers up to the mountain, once he has managed in his limited French to convince them that there are indeed "Nazis sur la montagne!"
Over the course of the book, John is picking up more and more French words. At the start of the trip, his mother made him a promise: if he learns enough French to write her a letter, she'll buy him a fancy bicycle light. And then of course he makes friends he wants to talk to, so the urgent need to communicate is added to this purely mercenary situation, and the French words start to litter the narrative, and by the last couple of chapters he's slipping into entire French phrases, and I was clutching my seat because was the book - was it going where I thought it was -
And yes it was! The last few pages are John's letter to his mother, all in French! And I could read it.
I realize I am not the best judge of this, because I do have some prior familiarity with French, but I really do think that a reader with no French at all would be able to read it by the end of the book, because the vocabulary has been layered in so cleverly, and repeated over and over: John keeps using more and more French words as the book goes on. And also John's oncle explained to him that, because of the Norman Conquest, English and French share a bunch of vocabulary, which certainly does simplify things, and it would certainly be much harder for a book to manage this trick with, say, Finnish; but it's also stunning that any book managed it at all, with any language! Four pages in French at the end, and you breeze right through!
The book takes place just after the end of World War II. John's father is still doing post-war work in France; John and his mother go to join him, and then John is sent to stay in his mother's ancestral village of St. Chamant with his uncle Paul Langres ("mon oncle"), who is building an airplane (or rather a glider, as John realizes with chagrin) which he hopes will repair the family fortunes, which hit rock bottom when the Nazis burnt down the ancestral Langres home. But the mayor of the town, who is trying to be the Langres land at rock-bottom prices, keeps interfering with his plans...
This book is many things, and one of them is an exciting thriller, which is not a genre much represented among the Newbery award winners. It's quite tense! When John visits the wreck of the Langres house, he finds a knapsack hanging from one of the intact walls, containing... drumroll please!... a Nazi revolver, showing that a Nazi soldier is still hiding in the mountains!
The mayor refuses to believe it! John decides that the mayor must be convinced! He comes up with what he believes is an excellent plan to convince the mayor: he and his new friend Charles will steal some of the mayor's livestock, dropping a few German coins on the scene to show that it was definitely a Nazi who did it.
Unfortunately, John's French is still quite rudimentary, so when he tries to explain his plan to Charles, it involves a lot of repetition of the words "le maire... cochon... Nazi...", leading Charles to believe that the mayor is a pig of a Nazi. Will he help? "Je suis patriote!" Charles proclaims, to John's great confusion, but hey, as long as Charles is on board!
But when they go to the mayor's house to steal his livestock, they discover that le maire IS in fact a pig of a Nazi! (Or rather a greedy former collaborator, same diff.) The mayor and his Nazi co-conspirators chase the boys into the mountains, where they run for help to Oncle Paul, who is just on the verge of launching his glider when the boys arrive with a trio of Nazis in hot pursuit. Charles' sister Suzette, taking in the scene at a glance, realizes that there is only one way out: she shoves John into the glider and cuts the rope holding it in place, so he can soar down to the valley for help!
The chief Nazi runs after him, shooting at the glider, only to fall off the cliff. Oops! Left with only le maire and a lesser Nazi to deal with, Oncle Paul and Charles and Suzette subdue their captors by the time that John leads the villagers up to the mountain, once he has managed in his limited French to convince them that there are indeed "Nazis sur la montagne!"
Over the course of the book, John is picking up more and more French words. At the start of the trip, his mother made him a promise: if he learns enough French to write her a letter, she'll buy him a fancy bicycle light. And then of course he makes friends he wants to talk to, so the urgent need to communicate is added to this purely mercenary situation, and the French words start to litter the narrative, and by the last couple of chapters he's slipping into entire French phrases, and I was clutching my seat because was the book - was it going where I thought it was -
And yes it was! The last few pages are John's letter to his mother, all in French! And I could read it.
I realize I am not the best judge of this, because I do have some prior familiarity with French, but I really do think that a reader with no French at all would be able to read it by the end of the book, because the vocabulary has been layered in so cleverly, and repeated over and over: John keeps using more and more French words as the book goes on. And also John's oncle explained to him that, because of the Norman Conquest, English and French share a bunch of vocabulary, which certainly does simplify things, and it would certainly be much harder for a book to manage this trick with, say, Finnish; but it's also stunning that any book managed it at all, with any language! Four pages in French at the end, and you breeze right through!
