It’s always reassuring to know that, if I’m looking for a quick quality
read, I can always find a book by Beryl Bainbridge (and all my key second-hand
shops, Fopp, Books for Free etc. seem to have copies of them somehow). This one
in particular was probably coming from Books for Free.
While I didn’t like it as much as An
Awfully Big Adventure or Harriet Said…
(which I’ve only just realized I never wrote about in this blog – silly me!
As it’s an outstanding, thought-provoking and disturbing read) I still enjoyed Master Georgie. More than anything, I think
Bainbridge deserves to be praised for looking at the Crimean War (a war about
which I know next to nothing – in case anyone needed further proof that I’m a
bad historian).
The one issue I had with this book, however, was that I found it rather “uneven”:
of the six chapters narrated by three characters (but never by Georgie
himself), Myrtle’s two are absolutely beautiful and touching (after all,
Bainbridge has always been an absolute master at describing the lives of
troubled girls with their hopes, fantasies, and realities), Pompey’s ones are
cute and endearing in an Oliver Twistesque kind of way, but Potter’s ones are
just a bit too plain (I do realize Bainbridge needed to have a more mature –
although not necessarily reliable – narrator, in particular in Crimea, but I
just didn’t find his chapters to be at the same level as the others’).
