I have throughly enjoyed the experience, some of the stories I had read or heard through the narrations by Martin Jarvis during my childhood but others were new to me. With this book I have come to the end of my Just William adventures (the ones I own anyway). I really enjoyed this collection, as it had the familiar Just William style, but also explored new terrority in the wartime setting. These are the tales of William and his band of Outlaws as they live through the events of the Second World War.

I wonder what he's up to?Īn excellent, amusing set of Just William stories, with something of a twist. Not bad considering he would have been born just before or during the First World War. I like to imagine that when his creator died he was finally released to grow up. (In the very earliest stories - in one which he visits a 'kinematograph' - William seems a little younger, but he never grows any older) - as another commenter has said, he exists in a kind of 'magical stasis'. William remained 11 & 3/4 years old until Crompton's death in 1969. William's self-justifying speeches are both hilarious and almost Orwellian in the inarguability of their twisted logic. Her dialogue, like Pinter's, is not naturalistic, but strikes one as perfect in its modulation. Reading the stories as an adult, it strikes me that Richmal Crompton was one of the great English writers of comic dialogue, on a par with Harold Pinter. The William books present a sort of hidden history of English childhood, from the 1920s to the late 1960s.

It's a wonderful collection of stories in its own right, and a fascinating document of its period. I didn't come across 'William at War' until quite recently. I have yet to come across a William story that falls noticeably short of the series' high standard.Īlthough the books that I read as a child were published during the war, when my father was a boy, they were mostly written in earlier eras, the 1920s and 1930s. Wodehouse: both had an utterly distinctive comic style, one that never faltered, and both recycled their favourite themes shamelessly without ever becoming stale. Richmal Crompton had much in common with P. They formed the staple of my boyhood reading (and dreaming) - a dozen or so tattered red-bound hardbacks, printed on yellowing war economy paper, that I had inherited from my father's boyhood reading - every story read a hundred times, every one an old friend, known intimately for its particular qualities of humour, language, description, character. The 'William' books are, of course, incomparable.

Richmal crompton william books