the silver donkey
By sonya hartnett
puffin books

There are stories that are told, and there are others that need to be told. The highest praise that this reviewer can shower on Sonya Hartnett’s The Silver Donkey is that it will be apparent, even to the most casual reader, that it is a story that belongs to the latter category.

Two young girls, Coco and Marcelle, who live in an idyllic village in France, run away screaming from the woods, shocked (and delighted) at having discovered what they think to be a dead man. Excited beyond their wildest dreams because they are the ones to have found him (and not their slightly older brother Pascal), they muster enough courage to go back and check if he really is dead.

As it happens, the man is not dead, simply dead tired. Coco and Marcelle, after getting over initial apprehensions, befriend him, only to learn that he is a soldier who has just walked away from a war that is being fought. They soon realise that the man, whom they call Monsieur Lieutenant, is blind, and that he wants to go back home to meet his terminally ill brother. Taking pity on him, they decide to help him.

The girls come back with whatever food they manage to steal from their mother’s pantry. And, in return, the blind soldier tells them stories. All the stories have one thing in common, though. They are all connected to the soldier’s good-luck charm — a tiny, perfectly crafted silver donkey.

When the girls decide to tell their brother about Monsieur Lieutenant, thinking that he would be able to think up a plan to send the soldier home, the boy also becomes a listener. But he does not care too much for the soldier’s parables. He, like any other 13-year-old boy, yearns to hear stories about the war being fought in the trenches, about the heroism of his country’s soldiers.

The author’s mastery over prose and plot lies in the way she manages to juxtapose the horrors of war with the picture-perfect setting in France where the soldier recounts his tales. Again, though war is no kids’ stuff, she gets her point across marvellously, without being preachy or without hesitating to show death in extreme close-up, something children’s writers do very rarely.

And this is exactly why this is a story that simply needed to be told. It is at once a story about love and friendship, about hope and courage. Most importantly, it is an unflinching but gentle commentary on the sheer futility of war. And that is no mean feat.