The North-East as Social Landscape in the Fiction of Robert Westall

Abstract

Robert Westall (1929–93), one of the most prolific and highly regarded British writers for children of the late twentieth century, repeatedly wrote about the north-east of England. Whether he was exploring its Christian heritage or the way it responded to the bombs and threat of invasion in the Second World War, and no matter whether he was working in a realistic genre and idiom or exploring the terrain in one of his supernatural tales, it is the North-East – its history, people and particularly its landscape — that provides the content, idiom and metaphors of his fiction. Given the impact of his books, in particular the number used as class texts across the UK, his iteration of the North-East will be among the first a generation of young readers encountered. For this reason alone his work invites investigation; the fact that his view of the region is a complex and at times ambiguous one – he left the area as a young man and remained in what can be understood as a form of exile from it thereafter — that works differently for readers with varying degrees of knowledge of the area and the way it has been imaged culturally, gives it added value.¹