Light

by Alan Davidson

"What luck to be born in this generation. Danger? The salt of life. Death? He is immune." Decades after the end of the Second World War, the dashing German pilot feels differently. His civilian life has been built on false heroism and his remorse is all-consuming. When he thinks he sees the English village he is meant to have destroyed, he returns to face his conscience. There he meets 13-year-old Warren, who has never known battle, but he thinks he can understand it from books and photos. He and his friends agree to help Herr Hartung find the village, and in doing so, they find their attitudes challenged - and become involved in the conclusion to a wartime encounter.

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 2003

About the author

A British children's author whose work has been compared to that of Richmal Crompton, Alan Davidson is of Scots descent, and was born in Langholm. He was educated at Thorne Grammar School, and pursued a career in the Civil Service, before turning to editing and writing. His first children's novel was published in 1978, under the pseudonym A.D. Langholm, undoubtedly chosen to honor his birth-place. Currently, Davidson publishes under his own name, and later reprints of his earlier work reflect that change.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Daisy May Johnson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Light tells the story of a young boy who, through wince-worthy coincidence, finds himself caught up in a strange echo of events from World War Two.

You can probably guess from that sentence alone, I didn't get on this this book. It's not say that I demand realism from fiction. Far from it. If something is well-written, and exciting, I don't care if the protagonist is blatantly manipulated into position. God, I forgive anything from Elinor M. Brent-Dyer and she is the QUEEN of coincidence. But Light just felt like it was written by numbers.

There was some interest here in the shift of perspective and narrative voices to provide a wider point of view upon events. But that interest was brief, and particularly negated when it came to the events of the final few pages. I'll not spoil them here but when you have your lead protagonist narrating in a flashback structure, you pretty much blunt any suspense over their narrative journey. Throw them into a life-threatening situation? Doesn't matter, cos you know they're narrating the book so they survived.

Light was well written in parts but these problems of structure and plot contrivances managed to detract from what could have been a much greater whole.

[Neill Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A German war hero returns to England to set right an action he performed there during World War II. He meets a group of high school aged boys, one with a special interest in the war and he finds an ally to help him with his mission. As the story unfolds the citizens of this small English village find a culmination of the events that shaped their lives thirty-five years earlier.