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Making Sense Out of Senselessness: The Social Construction of Adolescent Reality in the War Novels of Robert Westall

The late Robert Westall returned again and again to several themes and motifs in his novels for young people: cats, antiques, and motorcycles, to name three. Perhaps his greatest contribution to children’s literature, however, is his depiction of war and its impact on young protagonists. In this essay, I would like to focus on the three war novels by Robert Westall that have generated the most critical acclaim: The Machine Gunners (winner of the 1976 Carnegie medal and runner-up for the Boston Globe/Horn Book award), Kingdom by the Sea (winner of the Guardian award and runner-up for the 1991 Carnegie medal), and Gulf (runner-up for the 1993 Carnegie medal). My thesis is that in each of these novels, the young hero’s sense of himself and his place in the world is socially constructed, a product of the boy’s relationships with other people who are culturally situated in a world at war. I will look at the ways in which the adolescent protagonists in the novels try on roles, acquire social knowledge, and construct a reality that enables them to make sense out of the apparently senseless events that war has introduced into their lives.