Popular Culture Review
one of her stolen library books, The Francine Odyssies
The cut to the house occurs immediately after the following lines: “Meanwhile,
on the Plains of Tabitha, Francine rested. There would be another time for
war.” Indeed, that “war” was coming from several fronts for Suzy and Sam.
storm which the narrator warned us about in the Second Movement. As the
storm hits, Sam and Suzy escape to St. Jack’s Church, where they met a
year earlier, and where this year’s performance of Noye’s Fludde has been
The Young Person’s
Guide, all of the “families”—barring the Billingslys—are brought together in
a fugue of voices and action. In short, the Khaki Scouts, their leaders, the
Bishops, Captain Sharp, Social Services, Sam and Suzy, and a church full of
townsfolk huddle against the storm while, leave it to Anderson, several children
are listening to a record of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde. Throughout the scene we
hear, diegetically barely audible in the background, “The Spacious Firmament
prepare to leap from on high atop St. Jack’s steeple. Once the action moves
from inside to outside the church, the music extradiegetically shifts to “Noye,
Take Thy Wife Anone,” also from Noye’s Fludde. Captain Sharp intervenes,
and with the reluctant approval of Social Services over a walky-talky, becomes
Sam’s new foster father. Just then, lightning strikes the steeple, obliterating it;
Sharp, Sam, and Suzy literally hang from a rope tied to Sharp’s ankle, saving
them, as the music comes to a crescendo with children singing “Halleluiah.
Halleluiah.”
The storm, the narrator tells us, was the “region’s most destructive
meteorological event of the second half of the twentieth century. . . . The
coastal areas of New Penzance were battered and changed forever. Mile 3.25
Tidal Inlet [where Sam and Suzy camped before getting caught by her parents
and Captain Sharp, and where presumably they had intercou