One criticism I have of The Guardians is that it ends just when the most interesting and exciting part of the story is about to start. Perhaps John Christopher was intending to write a sequel but never got around to it!
I also find the final part of the story and the ending disappointing and unsatisfactory. What we get seems just an outline or a summary when compared with the early chapters.
There is a lack of balance and consistency of approach in that while it takes two thirds of the book just to get the young hero Rob Randall out of his old life in the Conurb of London and into his new school in the County, some of the most crucial developments in the story are covered in just the last few pages. Perhaps there was a mad rush to beat a deadline or there was a problem with exceeding an agreed word count.
The detailed description of’ Rob’s escape from the awful boarding school and journey to the County is not balanced with equally detailed accounts of his subsequent experiences up to the point where he learns something terrible about how the Guardians of the County deal with dissidents.
The Guardians
After the revolt has been put down, a patrol of Guardians comes to the house looking for Mike. Even though the Giffords insist that Rob knows nothing and was not involved in the uprising, they take him away for questioning.
He is ‘interviewed’ by Sir Percy Gregory, the Lord Lieutenant of the County. Sir Percy reveals that he has known all along that Rob is an imposter:
“You can, of course, no longer be treated as an ordinary member of our society. You are not one, after all. You are a Conurban, posing as County. You are listed by the Conurb police as a runaway from the boarding school at Barnes. So I don't mind telling you that this society is not so haphazard and unorganized as it seems. Things are investigated and checked: thoroughly. We had the boy from Nepal and the absentee from the boarding school matched within twenty-four hours of the first automatic query.”
Rob realises that it is useless to say that he knows nothing at all about the plot. He tells Sir Percy everything he knows about the dissident schoolboys, but he doesn’t mention Mike’s recent visit to the Gifford home.
Fear, relief and horror
Sir Percy uses a clever manipulation technique: first he tells Rob that he will be sent back to the boarding school at Barnes, then after that has sunk in he offers Rob a chance to stay.
He says that Rob is Guardian material and if he will agree to be recruited he will be able to carry on with his current life, openly as a member of the Gifford family and secretly as a member of the elite and powerful group that manipulates and controls the people of both the Conurbs and the County from behind the scenes.
Rob accepts the offer.
Sir Percy goes on to say that he wants Rob to help the Guardians catch Mike Gifford. He says that nothing will happen to Mike apart from a simple (but horrific) procedure that will leave him the same person but without any inclination to rebel.
Rob’s conversion
When Rob returns to the Giffords’ house after his encounter with Lord Lieutenant Sir Percy, he has a conversation with Mrs Gifford in which he learns that Mr Gifford has had the procedure to make him docile and that she thinks that Mike would be better off if he surrendered and had it too.
This is the big turning point for Rob.
He reviews many incidents from the past and sees much that he has previously overlooked.
He now understands why Mike Gifford's father and their friend Penfold's father are weak and ineffectual and obsessed with their hobbies. No wonder that Mike didn't want to surrender: he knew what would happen to him.
Rob realises that his father was a revolutionary and was probably murdered by the police, and that the kind neighbour who took him in and wanted him to go to the boarding school ‘for safety’ is a revolutionary too.
He decides that the County is not after all the place where he wants to live; the price is too high. He decides to leave his safe, comfortable niche and privileged new life with its good prospects and return to the Conurbs.
The end is the beginning
The Guardians ends with Ron about to dig his way under the fence at the start of his return journey. He is much better prepared this time; he intends to find Mike and his old neighbour and join the underground resistance movement that is working to overthrow the system.
Although this will entail a life of hardship and great danger and the odds are against him, after what Rob has learned he feels that there is no alternative.
Rob ran away from the horrible boarding school because he could not face being tortured or becoming a torturer; he leaves the County for an underground life because he cannot face being a puppet or a puppetmaster.
It is a matter of conscience; as Martin Luther said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”
Violet Needham’s Stormy Petrel
There are some scenes and elements in The Guardians that remind me of Violet Needham’s Stormy Petrel series, The Black Riders in particular. The troops of Black Riders go around on horseback and wear black tunics; the Guardians go around on horseback in red tunics.
The young hero Dick Fauconbois, who is approximately the same age as Rob and has also lost both of his parents, joins the revolutionaries just as Rob eventually does.
Dick holds out when Count Jasper, the Governor of the Citadel, puts a lot of pressure on him to betray his associates; Rob too demonstrates his honour and loyalty by saying nothing about Mike's plan to go to the Conurbs to Sir Percy even before he learns about what the Guardians do to dissidents.
As Stella Gibbons says in My American about a typical Amy Lee hero, “...he never betrayed a friend, he never gave in to his enemies.”
Rob’s story may have ended, but there is still more to say about some elements of The Guardians and there are more connections to come.
The red riders and the black:
