In her marvelous speech, Talent Is Not Enough, collected in an anthology of the same name, the prolific Scots children's author Mollie Hunter discusses the "cruelty" implicit in much of the British children's literature published before a certain date - literature in which the experiences of working class people, when not absent altogether, were frequently a source of either amusement or danger for the middle and upper class protagonists. This analysis was very much in my mind as I began Antonia Forest's The Thuggery Affair - the sixth entry in a ten-book series that follows the large Marlow family through their school and holiday adventures - as the school-story (there are four in the series) was one of the genres specifically singled out by Hunter as being problematic. The fact that this particular tale involves a confrontation between the privileged Marlows, together with their friend Patrick Merrick, and a group of reform-school boys working on a neighboring property, made me all the more afraid that it would partake of that cruelty Hunter decries, and I was not looking forward to the experience of reading it.

But although Forest's narrative had its problems, I found it unexpectedly moving, and have been struggling for weeks to articulate just why that is, and to explain how it both does, and does not, exemplify the class marginalization described by Hunter. Set during the half-term holidays, shortly after the events of Peter's Room (which follows the Marlows through the previous Christmas break), it centers on the adventures of Peter and Lawrie Marlow and their friend Patrick Merrick, who stumble upon a drug-smuggling operation being run by the "Thuggery" - a nickname given by the Marlow siblings to the reform-school boys (or "Teds") working on their neighbor Miss Culver's property. When it emerges that the Thuggery's activities, in caring for Miss Culver's racing pigeons, are a blind for criminal activity, the three companions set out to alert the police, only to find themselves blocked and pursued by their almost incomprehensible adversaries.

Much has been made, in almost every review I have read of The Thuggery Affair, of the obscure language used by the thugs: an extremely colloquial dialect that many readers seem to find over-the-top, and difficult to understand. Oddly, although I agree that it can be off-putting at first, I was able to understand it after a while, and was less interested in its comprehensibility (or lack thereof) than in its use as a means of distancing the reader from the characters. Here we go again, I thought, with another portrait of those strange working class people, and their funny speech patterns! It didn't help that the thugs were depicted as a sort of threatening blank slate, known to the children only by their clothing - Black Check, Purple Streak, Yeller Feller - or that Miss Culver's false bluffness and bullying behavior are laid at the door of her "unwomanly" nature ("She raises my hackles and my gorge. She's a loathly female... he says she stands four-square and looks him straight in the eye and talks to him man to man and it frightens him to death").

Well-written and involving as the story may be - and it is both - I was conscious of a sense of anger while reading the first two thirds of the book, of disappointment in Forest, who is capable of creating characters - both heroes and villains - with far more nuance and emotional depth than this. If I hadn't been determined to make my way through all ten of the Marlow books, I might have given up on this one. And then, more than halfway through the book, as Patrick makes his way to the dovecote at Monk's Culvery, everything changed. Suddenly, and most unexpectedly, I found myself emotionally engaged in the story, oddly moved by Patrick's endless repetition of a quotation from Patrick Shaw-Stewart's famous war-poem - "I saw a man this morning, Who did not wish to die. I ask, and cannot answer, If otherwise wish I." - and mesmerized with horror at the subsequent unfolding of events. Jukie, who before had been a generic villain, suddenly became a human being, and I simply couldn't look away, as he raced on toward destruction.

The final few chapters of The Thuggery Affair, which follow Patrick and Jukie's nighttime flight across the English countryside, after the death of one of the thugs, is one of the most melancholy pieces of writing I have read of late, and I suspect that it will haunt me for some time to come. Everything that was shallow and unreal before, suddenly seemed deeply felt and true. The casual acceptance of the class-system - often so implicit in works of this type - comes sharply into focus, and (however briefly) is questioned, as Jukie and Patrick discuss Patrick's MP father: "Yeh man, I get you," said Jukie after a pause, "You mean he doesn't need it. (to be Prime Minister) He's got it all already." It was Patrick's turn to pause and consider. The he said justly, "I expect there is quite a lot in that." Jukie's sudden realization of just what it is he's done, his stumbling conversation about god and religion with Patrick, their odd digression into the topic of the atomic bomb, and Patrick's ambiguous feelings for his erstwhile enemy - All the same, for no good reason he could think of, he hoped Jukie would make it. Provided one didn't mistake him for a friend, he was a rather likeable character." - were all terribly moving, and I found myself hoping for an outcome that I knew was impossible.

I cannot honestly say that Forest transcends the notion of class to be found in so much of her work, but the sudden poignant humanity of the villain - little more than a child himself - here, does manage to disrupt it. I came away from The Thuggery Affair with the sense, never felt before, that Forest had it in her to write something truly great, had something (I'm honestly not sure what) been different. ( )

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