Noah's Castle - The Complete Series [DVD]

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Because we hear the story only from Barry's perspective, who seems to think his father has taken a short train ride to crazy town, it's hard to get the full picture. Noah's Castle was filmed by Southern television and transmitted in seven 25-minute episodes in 1980. His best-known academic work is a reference series, Written for Children: An Outline of English Children's Literature (1965), [1] the definitive work of its time on the subject.

The dank shadow of WWII still hung heavy: youth clubs were held in ex-WAAF canteens, traces of Anderson shelters still poked through back gardens, and even thriving towns far from London displayed the exposed second-floor fireplaces and diagonal walls that were the badge of having been bombed by German planes. Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being rescued by the Terran Trade Authority. Very relevant to today's situation in post-Brexit post-Pandemic Britain, and that's before the climate emergency really hits us. Taut, pacy, and genuinely unsettling, Townsend’s Noah’s Castle takes place on the periphery of the unfolding chaos, revealing the story as it would be perceived by the more or less passive protagonists. This survival story is written in current times, and supposes a national financial melt-down, leading to a breakdown in electricity and food availability.

The impressive thing about this novel is that one is able to hold this and a completely opposing view at the same time (well, I can, and I’m 44)! In Norman’s plan, his family will be able to survive whatever hardships come their way and he will protect them and their home from the outside world. Wicked old Maggie Thatcher usually gets the blame, but, heinous as she was, Thatch was just the cleaver—the hand wielding it for the chop was the ingrained insularity and ignorance of us Brits. The story includes some grim satire of the British class system as the sexist, domineering father who’s smart enough to plan ahead is still vulnerable to flattery from a former boss and his bitterness over not rising in rank in the army. It blew aside any notion that the collapse of modern civilisation would in any way be some kind of glamorous, Hollywood-type adventure, and accurately showed it for what the Punk movement has always told us it would be- squalid, dirty, diseased and starving, with the army patrolling the streets, riots a common event, and the cities festooned with barbed wire and subject to curfews.

If this was a Robert Heinlein story or from any number of more conservative authors, the message would be something like, “Oh, Father seemed crazy, but he was so clever to keep us all safe during these hard times. Now that I got that out of my system I will attempt to explain why I feel so strongly about a YA book that is only 211 pages long.

As growing numbers of the inhabitants of a wealthy first-world country are forced to turn to food banks to survive the conservative government’s decision to make the poorest pay for a recession they didn’t cause, the Brexit parallels don’t just suggest themselves, they pretty much jump out and smack you in the face with a metaphorical riot shield. Bueno, eso fue diferente mas al sur del país, allá se derrumbaron edificios y puentes, se puso toque de queda y la gente comenzó a asaltar tiendas (no solo por comida) y el gobierno dijo que era ilegal acaparar alimentos.

The only thing I couldn’t quite get passed was the father’s attitude, but if you think about it he was only really trying to think about his family and their future. I think I was studying economics and history at the time and the thought that this all might have been so close to possible was compelling. It is superbly written, with much of the dialogue centering on moral dilemmas – if society is falling apart, do you choose to be compassionate to your neighbour, or do you choose to be selfish and put survival first at all times.

It also highlights the fact that what we now think of as preppers would once have been thought of as food hoarders—which is to say, not as admirably self-reliant individualists, but as the enemies of the rest of us. It is Norman’s solipsistic, patriarchal approach to life—a damaged worldview resulting from a childhood dominated by another man’s traumatizing self-obsession, and now playing out in another form through his son, and so on for ever—that creates, at least in part, the social fragmentation he so fears. His main characters bristle with indignation when their father suddenly moves them to an isolated, fortress-like mansion.

The series renders the grottiness, greyness, and shabbiness of a collapsing ’70s Britain (which didn’t look that different to supposedly uncollapsing ’70s Britain) surprisingly well: drinking and smoking abound, and gangs of resentful-looking blokes lurk on street corners, looking for a scapegoat to take out their frustrations on. A lot of the original British vocabulary (pavement, cellar for example) has been replaced with the US equivalent (sidewalk, basement). Originally published in 1975, Noah’s Castle was written by John Rowe Townsend, a deft and prolific children’s author who produced books in a range of genres from romance to thriller to science fiction, and who, although almost forgotten now, was well-known at the time for Gumble’s Yard (1961), a portrait of working-class life inspired by his reporting for the Manchester Guardian. By the end of the book, the father is in a fugue state feeling sorry for himself because he couldn't take care of his family.As much as you want to help the needy around you, how do you give away all of your food, not knowing when you may get more, knowing that it means your sickly little sister may go hungry? The book Noah’s Castle most reminds me of is Christopher Priest’s 1972 speculative fiction Fugue for a Darkening Island. Si estas buscando algún libro con lenguaje rebuscado, uno que tenga mas de 500 paginas, estas preocupado por la economía o tu país esta en crisis; de verdad no te lo recomiendo que lo leas. As played by underrated character actor David Neal, dad Norman is a much less ambiguous character than in the book but remains compellingly watchable, and Annette Ekblom makes a brilliant Nessie: insouciant, smart, and thoroughly credible, despite the occasional woodenness of the script.