BLOOD RED, SNOW WHITE (12+) by Marcus Sedgwick

THE SECRET COUNTESS (11+) by Eva Ibbotson

THE RUSSIAN Revolution is something most teenagers encounter in secondary school, yet finding novels about the Reds is extremely hard. Apart from Geoffrey Trease’s The White Nights of St Petersburg, there is nothing before Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to dramatise its confusing yet compelling events for children.

Marcus Sedgwick’s take on the battle between the Bolshevik and Tsarist armies in Blood Red, Snow White is thus particularly welcome.

Our hero is an English journalist, Arthur Ransome, who will become one of the best-known children’s authors of the 20th century. Long before Swallows and Amazons, Ransome was a collector of extraordinary Russian fairytales (still published by Jane Nissen as Old Peter’s Russian Tales, and highly recommended for 9+). Sedgwick has a faultless ear for the narrative voice of his subject, and the real-life story he reveals about spies, adultery, bloodshed and a fortune in gold that follows is irresistible.

Between 1917 and 1919 Ransome sent back reports on the Russian Revolution to the Daily News, and was soon the only English journalist left to witness the Bolshevik struggle, the execution of the Romanovs and the birth of the Soviet republic. In the middle of it all, he fell in love with Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia. Each was asked to spy on the other, Ransome by the British Embassy, Evgenia by her boss. Then Trotsky asked him to smuggle three million roubles in fabulous jewels out of Moscow. Did he do it? Or did she? How come a modest newspaper hack could afford to buy himself, only a couple of years later, a beautiful little sailing boat in which to tour the Baltic?

Sedgwick’s Ransome is too much of a cipher, like the fairy-tale prince he keeps finding himself not to be, and yet his story is a gripping one, especially once he returns to Russia to be reunited with Evgenia at all costs. Portraying the Revolution through his visionary eyes is inspired but, as the author says, Ransome’s story is “too good not to tell”, and these twin narratives do not sit easily together.

As with Eleanor Updale’s excellent Montmorency series, a children’s novel in which adults are the only protagonists makes the action both fascinating and remote, as if viewed from the wrong end of a telescope; I felt the second half of the story, which is much more romantic and compelling, should have been given more prominence than the diplomatic spying. Blood Red, Snow White is written in an oblique, pared-down style that will not be everyone’s cup of tea. Intelligent and discerning readers should, however, relish it.

Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret Countess (originally published as A Countess Below Stairs) is also about Russians living in impoverished exile after having lost their fabled jewel collection in flight. Thin, clever, passionate Anna is not afraid of getting her hands dirty – literally, because she becomes a “tweeny” or maidservant in a grand old house left reeling from the First World War.

Of course she falls in love with the young earl, about to embark on a disastrous marriage to the rich, heartless Muriel, and he with her. The seeming inequality between them forbids a match, however. Far from being a tired retread of Cinderella, this revitalises it. The descriptions of exiled Russian aristos scraping a living in London as princely servants, interleaved with withering satire on snobbery and proto-Nazi eugenics, are touchingly funny. The author of children’s classics such as Journey to the River Sea, Ibbotson is the Rolls-Royce of romantic comedy, and the reissue of these novels for teenagers is splendid news – though its White sympathies may persuade them that the revolutionaries got it wrong.

BLOOD RED, SNOW WHITE (12+) by Marcus Sedgwick

Orion, £9.99; 192pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £9.49 (free p&p)

THE SECRET COUNTESS (11+) by Eva Ibbotson

Young Picador, £6.99; 352pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £6.64 (free p&p)

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