Biggles Hits The School

[rosanicus]

On Monday last week we had Year 6 external writing moderation. We'd been preparing for it pretty much non stop for two months, and in those two months I think I might possibly have read about four pages of any book which wasn't written by an eleven year old child. And so it was with great relief that I discovered that without that sword of Damocles above my head I have managed to smash through TWO Biggleses in under a week!

Biggles Hits The Trail

My edition of this is one of the wartime dustjackets but I think it was actually printed in the early 50s. The main draw is that the text is larger so it looks like I'm read a big and worthy tome when in fact it is Biggles vs invisible radioactive monks.

Anyway, I enjoyed this! It's a very strange book, with a number of insane twists and turns which don't quite come together, but I have to admit that the sheer balls to the wall madness of it all drew me in. The initial scene at dinner with Algy and Ginger heckling Biggles is perhaps one of the greatest opening scenes in Bigglesian history, and I'll cherish it always. I also liked the way that Malty summoned them to his home to attend to Dickpa, and that I can interpret Dickpa and Malty's relationship as the sugar daddy dynamic of all time (but this time, the sugar daddy is the mid-twenties nerve case sugaring his middle aged boyfriend).

I would caution against reading this without a stronger stomach for the Oh W. E. Johns school of beleaguered sighing, though. IYKYK.

Biggles Goes To School

And on the other end of the insanity spectrum we have Biggles at Big School. I liked this well enough, especially that it had at least some continuity with The Boy Biggles, but I found that (once again) it mostly made me wail 'he's LITTLE' every time something once again happened to Biggles. He finds a father figure who seems willing to nurture him in some way who almost immediately gets shot in the chest by poachers and when he cries over it the other boys make fun of him!!! He's LITTLE!!!!!

My favourite interlude was of course the day that a pilot came to school and Biggles saw an aeroplane for the first time. And then in the same chapter he manages to save a bear from getting shot by an angry mob through the medium of kindness. BIGGLES ❤️.

Also, as a treat after all this work stress, I got myself a small friend.



He apparently had goggles once upon a time but my only evidence of that is quite a lot of perished rubber stuck to his fur and other clothes.

Comments

[philomytha]

That is a EXCELLENT small friend! And the opening of Hits the Trail is fantastic, there should be entire books of the three of them bantering and heckling each other and throwing tableware around :DDD

[rosanicus]

It's so good! Extremely sweet and domestic and grounded so that you can then be hit in the face by the Invisible Assassin Monks and Death Ray. Perfect plot construction, no notes.