The Firebird Trilogy by Nick Green reviewed by Julia Jones

I've just read the three parts of Nick Green's Firebird Trilogy as one big book. It's been a terrific experience and I'd happily go back to the beginning and start again.

Leo Lloyd Jones is a teenage joy-rider from Salford who is picked – accidentally, he assumes – to be part of an elite group of youngsters who might be required to rehabilitate the world in the case of cosmic catastrophe. This is Project Firebird. Now I don't normally do much in the way of cosmic catastrophe and my appetite for dystopias is distinctly limited. But I love adventure and stroppy teenagers and their capacity for moral decisions and courage and emotion and idealism and that's what Project Firebird gave me.

Leo's quality is leadership, the indefinable sort which is something quite different from ambition or the desire for power. Most of the time he's completely unaware of it but when push comes to shove he's usually able to make the right choices and find the words to inspire others. On his first day at Project Firebird he is sitting next to fourteen year old Rhys Carnavon, the fit, good-looking ' natural leader' who has just trekked back from Antarctica after witnessing the death of his scientist father. The shifting relationship between Leo and Rhys is a main plot strand running throughout the trilogy. It's complex, does not allow for second guessing and has a resonance beyond the individual characters. It's one of the reasons I'd like to read the trilogy again.

Plotting is excellent throughout. For me the books really began to sing at the shift between volumes one and two, Project Firebird to Firebird Dawn. The shock at the beginning of the second volume was, I thought, brilliantly managed – especially when an unexpected twist and additional layer of complexity was revealed later in the book. Another welcome moment was the emergence into the open air. Nick Green seems to be particularly good at evoking effects of light on landscape and glistening natural beauty. Not that the post-disaster countryside is uniformly lovely: there are methane flares from pockets of rotting garbage and a glimpse of a survivor spending his (short) life melting down abandoned plastic. One imaginative insight I especially enjoyed was Leo's occasional sense of his 'own' landscape – Salford, Manchester, the M6 motorway – buried a thousand years below the landscape on which he and his friends are struggling to survive.

There's cruelty and loss in this second volume but I feel somehow that it's the most human of the three. That's a descriptive not an evaluative point. The mainly female Blackwater village, the ruthless Dustral raids are small scale in comparison with the brutalities and stark struggles for existence in the final volume Firebird Radiant. That's fine. I think trilogies should work rather like symphonies with themes introduced, developed and brought to some resounding climax. AS such, however there the obvious danger or predictability and one of Nick Green's clevernesses in his third volume is to counterpoint the megalomaniac’s bid for global domination with the intimate domesticities of broken nights and nappy changing.

There are thrilling action sequences, delicate moments of relationship and some extraordinarily fine descriptive writing throughout the trilogy. There's also plenty of intellectual content and much to reflect on and discuss in our management of the natural world. I rather hope that we are sufficiently co-operative to establish a Global Seed bank to preserve crop varieties – currently I hear more about fragmentation and restrictive patenting. These books could be offered to consumers of The Hunger Games or Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses. Instead each volume is available for £1.85 on Kindle. I don't think this is ideological statement: I think this is 21st century publishing's failure.

Divided Loyalties by Dennis Hamley ... reviewed by Julia Jones

Dennis Hamley has set himself a challenging task -- republishing the first two volumes of his 'Ellen' Trilogy within a month of each other while still at work on the final part -- Unfinished Business.  Ellen's People came out in August and has been reviewed both here and on the ABBA site: Divided Loyalties appeared on schedule earlier this month (September).
   It's possibly not quite as ambitious a programme as Author's Electric Nick Green who bought out all three volumes of the Firebird Trilogy on a single day  but I would guess it still means that Dennis will have been foregoing some of the gentler pleasures of retirement. Will he be yearning for the uber-professionalism of Walker Books, the original publishers of Divided Loyalties?  Possibly, when engaged in fruitless negotiation about cover designs and managing all the nitty-gritty jobs that seem almost as demanding as writing. Certainly not when they then pulled out of publishing the concluding volume. I believe Nick Green suffered a similar let down in the final stages of a previous series.
   So here we have two authors, free to make their own choices about timing the release of their work. Neither chooses the book-a-year model of corporate publishing: one goes for broke on a single day, the other is publishing in monthly parts, making the readers wait but not asking them to wait too long. I used a six-month time scale for my 'Strong Winds' trilogy, though that was as much to suit my own circumstances as to attract / retain an audience. And still, three years on, the first volume outsells the other two by a margin that seems to replicate the worst features of primogeniture. Will Nick and Dennis find the same or will their alternative timetables even things up?
   It seemed to me that the second volume was the hardest to write -- how quickly could I move on, how much sign-posting and reiteration would be necessary? How to conclude without actually completing? I was correspondingly fascinated to see how Dennis Hamley could ensure that Divided Loyalties was not eclipsed by its successful older sister? By writing a completely different book -- both structurally and thematically. Divided Loyalties is independent from chapter one.
   When I reviewed Ellen's People  I mentioned that I was looking forward to following Ellen in her post-war future as she and her German husband, Matthias, attempted to settle back into their possibly depressed 1920s village. I think I'd expected some sort of fictional Akenfield. Not a bit of it! Hamley leaps the reader forward more than a decade and Divided Loyalties opens in 1935 with Ellen and Matthias's stroppy oldest son, Walter, blasting away at clay pigeon targets and wishing they were his equable, understanding father.
   Ellen's primary role in this novel is as the loved and loving mother: most of the fictional interest lies with the next generation. Walter is troubled, angry, confused and it's a strength of Hamley's characterization that he doesn't offer the easy reconciliation that this reader, at least, was longing for. There is also Helmut, the Nazi cousin, Paul and Anna the younger and more conventionally talented children. They've had an easier upbringing as Matthias and Ellen have prospered -- though Matthias will discover that even twenty years' blameless residence may not be enough to spare him when England and Germany go to war again.
   In my review of Ellen's People I  mentioned that it didn't tell me anything much about WW1 that I didn't already know (I hope I made it clear that this was an observation not a criticism -- and might, anyway, only be personal). Divided Loyalties, the WW2 novel, has taken me onto less familiar ground -- such as the forced evacuation of internees to Canada. I enjoyed being RAF ground crew, then a rear-gunner with Walter and a tank commander in the Russian campaign with Helmut. This is a novel with strong male characters and Hamley portrays their lives on active service with authority.
   Plot-wise it's a pleasure to have known Ellen in her younger days and there are some back references to Ellen's People but it's certainly not essential.  In fact I can imagine young male readers going straight for Divided Loyalties with never a glance behind them. I wonder what the third volume will hold -- I'm certainly not going to attempt any predictions!

Divided Loyalties by Dennis Hamley was first published by Walkter Books in 2008 and has now been reissued by the Blank Page Press