This novel is an excellent read on many levels. As a simple narrative it is, as the kids say, “brill” - sharp characters, interesting plot twists, and a charming-but-sad tale of growing up in the early 80s. As someone who was too young to remember the early 80s but is old enough to have heard a lot about it, I found this level of the story to be a fun exercise in shadow nostalgia.

On another level it’s an exploration of personal and political conflict, and a clever kind of social commentary. The Cold War writ large, the Falklands War as a chapter within that larger war, the domestic battles at home and those at school for Jason Taylor - these are interwoven nicely, in a way that allows each conflict to serve as a sort of reflection of the other. My one misgiving is that the author more or less hits us over the head with this juxtaposition in the solarium chapter, rather than giving us the pleasure of discovering it for ourselves. Mitchell’s voice is largely sympathetic to the small-town British he describes, but the sides he chooses in these conflicts is clearly one that sees their flaws in microscopic detail.

I very much enjoyed the themes of confused identity and misdirected names, of obstructed expression, and of broken machinery (the last one, nicely bookending the whole story). These were vividly depicted, perfectly apt for the setting, and wonderfully complementary, one to the other. I am always a sucker for machinery that symbolizes abstractions, and the choices here - of old watches and modern calculators - seemed exactly right for someone who has trouble with time and math both.

In terms of characters, I could not have been more delighted by Madame Crommelynk, and particularly her comment that translations between Europeans are discourteous. Dean Moran’s loyalty and Squelch’s profundity masquerading as idiocy stood out nicely, Julia transitioned from the too-cool teenager into the wise older sister perfectly; and, one drawback, the bullies really all blended together unintelligibly. As a rule they were stock characters who we’ve met many times, but they were brought to life uniquely.

It’s not unheard of for a book to use a coming-of-age story as a mirror for social commentary about the “growing-up” of a nation, a society’s loss of innocence in the face of something terrible. Forrest Gump was perhaps the best example of that technique as applied to the US in the 60s; this book is, as best as I can tell, the first book to look at the Cold War in this way, and I think it stands up wonderfully.