Dandelion Days

The Flax of Dream #2

by Henry Williamson

312p cloth with pink dustjacket, jacket a little worn and rubbed with marginal loss, text clean, edges dusty, name to endpaper, early edition

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Henry William Williamson was an English soldier, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels, as well as for his fascist sympathies. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter.

Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mother gave me this book when I was fourteen. It was a rare thing for her to do, in fact I don't think she's ever done it since. I don't know if she knew me well enough to predict my response or not but it has been a book that I have loved from the time I read it till now and is one of the few books which I revisit regularly.

This is the second of four books collectively called "The Flax of Dream" in which we meet and follow Willie Maddison on his journey from boyhood to adulthood and which includes his time in the trenches. In this book he is a pupil at a grammar school and, like most boys his age, he is struggling to make sense of his changing world, mind and body.

There is little similarity between Willie's life and mine and yet somehow it made such perfect sense to me. I have always found it deeply moving yet for no reason that I can iterate, or perhaps that I wish to acknowledge.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me a long time, in part because the older English with its period slang can be hard to get into, and I kept putting it down after each chapter. But now in the last few chapters, I’ve raced through - this book ended on such a beautiful and moving note, and captured me profoundly in its beautiful and loving descriptions of place and of friendship. The bittersweetness of the end of school and the step into the unknown of work and future is captured incredibly well.

HUGE caveat, though. This book is a relic of a time when England was a colonial power, and the attitudes expressed by the characters towards non-Europeans are dismaying.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truth be told, I do not know what attracted me to this book. Maybe it was after reading the blurb by 'The Observer', which states:

"Gets as near to the heart of a boy as anything I have read for many years. Willie Maddison (the protagonist) is a person and a representative. His history is beautiful - and important."

I have quoted this short statement in full as I believe it says more in three sentences than an actual thesis can say about this book. I think the key word from that blurb is "beautiful". I elaborate, this is a truly beautiful bildungsroman with very perceptive and profound writing, with some of the best examples of agrarianism to be found in English literature. And it tells a profound story, an almost Dickensian story in my opinion, of a poor boy (Willie Maddison) with a big heart trying to find his place in a beautiful but unforgiving world, with a lot of psychological and philosophical growth in between (even though sometimes Willie appears not to change a lot, like a normal boy who doesn't listen to good advice).

I believe this book is an achievement in literature, which merits a better study than mine to accredit its narrative merit.