I came across The Far-Distant Oxus, as apparently many other readers have, by way of its appearance not only on Wikipedia's list of novels published in 1937 but on a number of if-you-like-"Swallows and Amazons"-you'll-like-this lists, and this plus the novelty that it was written by two schoolgirls, about the same age as the children they were writing about, was appealing enough for me to hunt down an early edition.
It feels more than a bit churlish to say that I didn't like it much — I appreciate it for what it is, a full-length novel written by a pair of fifteen-year-old school friends, who were not only determined enough to plan it all out and write it (editing each other's chapters apparently without qualm or rancor!) but were also brave enough to send it to Arthur Ransome, who even in 1937 was quite famous. Full marks there! But it does read like the writing of schoolgirls — intelligent ones, well-read ones, to be sure, just very young. (Did children in 1937 really say "Umm" so very often? and not in a pondering sort of way, but meaning simply "yes"?)
The plot is often pithily described as "Swallows-and-Amazons with horses instead of boats," which was not at all off-putting, since I was a horse-mad girl myself, though alas mostly from a distance, and obviously I love the "Swallows and Amazons" series deeply. But I actually found myself wishing that this book had more horses in it –there are horses around quite a lot, and the main adventure is a week-long ride across the Devon moors to a particular lake (parentless, as are the Swallows' and Amazons' adventures). But while sailing is an integral part of many of the latter's adventures, the horses seem much less integral in the former, almost as though they are simply the means of getting to the lake, not characters in their own right, as often "Swallow" and "Amazon" almost seem to be. Whether by accident or design, one of the advantages of having youngest-brother Roger or new friends Dorothea and Dick Callum is that much technical detail can be supplied without it being dull authorial exposition — this is very similar to one of Stephen Maturin's functions in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, or Hastings' to Poirot and Watson's to Sherlock Holmes — and I think this story could have benefited from one of those. (And more horses.) The Oxus children are all somewhat interchangeable, except for the almost absurdly-perfect schoolgirl-fantasy boy Maurice — darkly good-looking, superbly capable and resourceful, and mysterious! — and don’t really hold up well in comparison to Ransome's deft characterizations of the four Walker children and the two Blackett girls, and re-reading Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy family series recently reminded me of the same thing, that Ransome and Enright both have characters which are not just physically different from each other but in character as well, which comes out in both their actions and their conversation.
All things considered, I appreciated reading this — horses (though not enough!), some beautiful descriptive passages — but I daresay that if I'd read The Far-Distant Oxus when I was ten, I would have loved it —
(For those of us who have not read much Matthew Arnold, the title refers to the river in Central Asia — the Amu Darya, classically the Oxus — featured in Arnold's narrative poem "Sohrab and Rustum," which so enchanted these young authors that their characters re-christen numerous landmarks along their journey with names from the poem.)
Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found here.
A Bluestocking Knits 