I bought a proof copy of this book off Ebay some time ago as I am a great fan of Arthur Ransome and I was looking forward to the tale. This is what I thought.
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Blood Red Snow White is the story of Arthur Ransome’s time in Russia and his love affair with Evgenia. It is a story we all know, if not in great detail, and with some literary embellishments would make a ripping boy’s own story.
Unfortunately, this book is not that.
It is split into three sections, each written in a different style, and focusing on a different aspect of the story. The first tells the history of the Russian revolution, and is written in the style of Old Peter’s Russian Tales. I found this section to be redundant as very little of the history of that time is needed to set the scene of Arthur’s story. The pages of metaphor with a bear raging towards the city and the narrative of Rasputin and the Romanovs have no direct impact on what comes later in the book, and would have been better to be compressed to a single page.
The middle has Arthur, on the night of an important meeting looking back at the moments leading up to it. It is here that we learn of Arthur’s meeting with Evgenia, his troubled relationship with Ivy, and his struggles travelling to and from Russia. The flashbacks are interspersed with Arthur’s thoughts and actions, all written in the present tense, which I found distracting from the main story.
The third part is the first person narrative of Arthur and tells of his time with Evgenia in Latvia, and then when she returns to Russia, how he follows to rescue her. Here we have the famous crossing of no mans land and the chess match with a White Army officer. This is the best part of the book, but even here seems to lack something. There is none of the vivid description of the countryside that you would expect from Arthur. The narrative is just a little pedestrian.
The book is quite readable, and gives us quite a detailed view of a troubled time in Russian history. What it is not is a children’s adventure book. Quite apart from the many different styles and at least one flashback that I didn’t realise was one until later, there are uses of language that is very adult. I will not be buying this for my school library.
This is a great missed opportunity. With a slightly simpler plot and more descriptive action written in the third person, we could have had a very good ‘based on true events’ adventure.
