Book Review: Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

This book is in bookstores now.

Beloved children’s author Michael Morpurgo is enjoying something of a renaissance with the world-wide success of the War Horse film and stage play. Now, his novel Private Peaceful, originally published in 2003, is about to be released on film, hence the republication of this thoughtful, tragic take on wartime Britain.

This is the deeply personal story of Tommo Peaceful, a gentle lad growing up in Devon just as the First World War takes its grip on Europe. He tells his story from a strained perspective as he struggles to stay awake, ‘I want to try to remember everything, just as it was, just as it happened’. With each chapter marking the passing of time from ‘Five Past Ten’ until ‘One Minute to Six’, the unsettling tick-tocking structure forms the spine of an even more anxiety-inducing social backdrop and plot.

The first-person narration is convincing, drawing us immediately into Tommo’s journey from the rural English countryside to underage soldier in the French battlefields. As he puts it, ‘Charlie and I went rattling off to war. It all seems a very long time ago now, a lifetime.’ At points the tone becomes a little schmaltzy and we crave a different character’s viewpoint, but this sentimentality is tempered by the horrifying descriptions of war, ‘Through a yellow mist I see the trench filling up with [gas]. It drifts into the dugouts, snaking into every nook and cranny, looking for me.’

Morpurgo uses his story to tackle huge social issues around war and conflict, and the treatment of soldiers, which undoubtedly make it appealing to anyone interested in engaging with it from a socio-historical angle. Equally enjoyable though are the more domestic questions posed about how to deal with love and complex family relationships. With such a narrow narrative perspective, readers will be conscious of not receiving all the answers and having to interpret situations for themselves. This is no bad thing however, and might well keep readers pondering long after the book is finished.

Parts of the novels are highly cinematic, so it’s easy to understand how this story would be considered for screen adaptation. One particularly tender passage recalls ‘the day of the yellow aeroplane’ in which the children spot their first plane, which turns out to be flown by a lost pilot. After he soars off, ‘we lay there in the long grass watching a single skylark rising above us, and sucking on our humbugs.’ A profound, tale; hankies required.

Reviewed by Caitlin Sinclair
Private Peaceful
By Michael Morpurgo
Published by HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780007486441