Biggles Sees It Through by Captain W.E. Jones

June 14th, 2008

Biggles Sees It Through
(in Biggles’ Big Adventures)
Captain W.E. Jones
186 p.

For Decades ‘08.

Prion, 2007.
(first published 1941)

Back cover blurb:

none

Biggles and his boys are in Finland, trying to do away with intruding Russian troops. Then they meet a Polish scientist, who has made great scientific advances about the atom bomb or something like that (all I understood is that it is something Very Important, and after getting the mission they don’t care about what is in the papers, really.), who has hidden away these papers, but must be retrieved by the British, so the Russian or German troops can’t get to them. Biggles, Algy and Ginger jump onto this chance like a crocodile jumps onto its food. Unfortunately, they don’t do very well. In the end they get the papers and they even survive, but before that they have won and lost the papers a number of times, of course to the evil von Stahlhein. They lose an unbelievable amount of aircrafts, but that is part of the charm. While trekking through an icy lake, Algy exclaims ‘D’you know, [...], I remember the time whn I used to do this sort of thing for fun. We called it a picninc.’ (354-355) This quote more or less sums up what happens in this novel. It is a very failed picnic.

But it hilarious. We have double-agents, smoking, Ginger stealing food, planes being lost, Biggles being chased by a bear. Could it be better?! Alright, maybe it could. Sometimes, the story trudges on quite slowly, and I, as a reader, am impatient to get on with the story. It is maybe my impatience, or perhaps some flaw of W.E. Jones’. Despite this sometime slow language, it is a hell of a story.

Entry Filed under: Challenges, Children, Decades '08, English, Fiction