Book review: The dog who could fly

Usually I'm the one who passes books to Mulan and Miya as reading suggestions.

This time it was the other way around.

Lately, Mulan and Miya have got interested in fighter planes -- especially those of the First and Second World Wars, and they have been getting fighter plane books out of the library.

One book they learnt about was Damien Lewis' The Dog Who Could Fly, a true story about a dog who flew bombing runs during the Second World War.  After they finished it the girls passed the book on to me and said I had to read it.  So I did.

It was an excellent choice.

Lewis wrote a direct, easily readable, child-friendly account of Robert Bozdech, a Czech airman who escaped via France to Britain during the war.  Flying for the French Air Force, Bozdech was shot down in no man's land, where he found a puppy in an abandoned farmhouse.  He tucked the puppy inside his jacket and crawled to safety.  From that time on Bozdech and Antis the German shepherd were inseparable.  When Germany overran France, they escaped to Britain, where Bozdech again flew bombing raids against Germany.

For many of the bombing runs, Antis flew with Bozdech, usually sleeping calmly at his feet.  A dog-sized oxygen mask was made for Antis, for when the unpressurised planes flew at higher altitudes.

Antis was injured on several occasions, but survived the war as beloved camp mascot and hero wardog.

It is a beautiful story of mutual loyalty between man and dog, and I highly recommend it.

My only complaint is that the narrative is a little too one-sided patriotic.  We can surely all agree that Second World War German command was evil and the German population was far too compliant in following and actioning the evil.  Nonetheless, the German people were still real people with real feelings.  They were not mere objects to be blown up and eliminated.  Too often, Bozdech came across as too single-minded in his determination to take revenge and kill as many German people as he could.  In keeping the storytelling simple, Lewis' writing style created a simplistic narrative which dehumanised the many people who Bozdech killed.

Sadly, for a book which was readable for Miya-aged children, I felt the book glorified war a little too much, with heroic goodies and impersonal baddies.  I think a better book would have been one that worked a little harder to emphasise the tragedy of war and acknowledge the shared humanity with those who happened to have been born on the other side of the border and consequently were drafted to fly the opposition aircraft.

Book review: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

I'd had Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie sitting in my bookshelf for a few years, after picking it up cheap at a book fair.  I'd heard of it as a worthy story, and thought it might be similar to the excellent movie Dead Poets Society (which the girls and I watched a few weeks ago).

Sad to say, Jean Brodie was a disappointment.  I wouldn't recommend it.  (Although I read that it is listed on the BBCs 100 most influential novels, for class and society.)

The story is set in a girls school in 1930s Edinburgh.  Just like Dead Poets, it's about an influential teacher (Miss Jean Brodie) whose personality inspires a small group of students to stand out and be different from the rest of the conservative school.

But unlike Robin Williams' character in Dead Poets, Miss Brodie is, at least in my opinion, right from the outset unappealing in pretty much every way.  She's an unprofessional bad teacher with wrong and ignorant ideas who arrogantly thinks she is right.  Her teaching colleagues mostly don't think much of her, and it seems that it's only a small (but strong) group of her students who are inspired by her to the extent that they are known throughout the school as the "Brodie set."  Presumably, her dozens of other students didn't find her inspiring.

Having an unlikable main character makes it hard, but not impossible, to be drawn into a story.  If the characters are psychologically deep and interesting, then a character-based story can still be engrossing.  But in the case of Jean Brodie, all the characters were presented superficially, as stereotypes with one-line descriptions, and throughout the story never rose much above that.

The back cover of the book informs us that "for comic observation and spicy dialogue it is impossible to outclass Muriel Spark."  I disagree.  Unless the comic observation was intended as bone dry and intensely self-depreciating, what social observations I saw were superficial.  As for the spicy dialogue, as far as I could see this mostly amounted to attention-grabbing out-of-place immature sexual references.  It was as if the author was trying to grab the reader's attention with light smuttiness.

The plot of the story jumped around oddly, with tension dissolved too early when it deserved to be built.  What I thought to be the two big mysteries of the story -- who betrayed Miss Jean Brodie and why Rose was famous for sex -- were explained early and cheaply.

At 128 pages it's a short story, and easy to read in a few hours.  So at least time-wise it's not a big investment in reading.  But I won't bother keeping our copy, and I won't bother offering it to Mulan to read.

Ballet exams

I've been super-busy lately, and haven't had time to online-congratulate Mulan and Miya for their awesome ballet exam results.

So, Mulan and Miya both sat their RAD ballet exams last term.  Results have been dribbling back.  Mulan did Intermediate Foundation, and got a high Merit pass (almost Distinction).  Miya did Grade 3 and got a solid Merit pass.

They also did their Contemporary dance exams, and both passed with Honours.

It's ballet show season now; they're busily preparing for their show on 7th and 8th of December.  This year they are doing Coppelia.

(I wrote about their last year's exams here.)