Boy Blue

by Stevie Davies

Genres: British Literature, Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 1987

About the author

Welsh born Stevie Davies is a novelist, literary critic, biographer and historian. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Academi Gymreig and is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Stevie Davies’s first novel and it won the Fawcett Prize. On the surface this is a family saga set over a couple of generations from 1944. The war is still going with rationing and the new threat of V2 bombs. The novel is set in Salisbury in a working class area and follows the Gartery family. Chrissie is eighteen and falls in love with a soldier about to go to Italy (Jim). They marry quickly and Chrissie became pregnant. The focus is on Chrissie, her mother and father, her two sisters Minnie and Lilian and Chrissie’s daughter Florence.
It is written in typical Davies style, with much more going on beneath the surface. The effects of war and a warrior culture are charted in terms of the lives of women and Chrissie dreads giving birth (especially to a boy child) in a time of war:
“ One night she dreamed … of giving birth to a ten-pound bomb, which slid out from between her legs in a trail of cold slime, and when she touched it the skin of her hand stuck to the freezing body. She woke the other girls in the dormitory with her screams. She would not survive. She realised this.”
Chrissie is admitted to a truly awful maternity home and gives birth to twins: a boy and a girl. She bonds with the girl, but not with the boy and she arranges for the boy to be adopted without telling her family or husband. The notion of the missing boy twin runs throughout the novel. The effects of this visceral reaction last. The book charts how war alienates men from the feminine and women from the masculine.
The men in the novel are a mixed bunch. Minnie’s husband is a violent abuser. Chrissie’s father was seriously debilitated by depression. The book is full of strong women who essentially get on with things. The focus is on the experience of women. It’s a good novel, not Davies’s best and there are language problems in relation to Downs Syndrome. It is though an interesting exploration of alienation.

[Andrew H · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first novel by Stevie Davies. It captures the dilemmas of those living under the shadow of war with humanity and understanding. Boy Blue is a novel with real social conscience and an emotional view of how women have fought for their independence-- no wonder it won the Fawcett Society prize.
Boy Blue begins this author's fierce dislike of warmongering, a theme that stretches into Arms and The Girl and The Element of Water.