John Marsden's Tomorrow, When the War Began and its six sequel novels were published in the years 1993–99. They belong to the corpus of young adult reader adventure fiction, which has been part of the European writing tradition since the great novels of Alexandre Dumas, Sir Walter Scott and R. L. Stevenson. Young protagonists fight ruthless enemies against great odds, surviving by dint of their courage, resourcefulness and loyalty to family and comrades-in-arms.
John Buchan's five Richard Hannay novels, which I read as a teenager, refined and modernised the genre. Buchan is relevant here, because his patriotic adventure fantasies had a serious purpose: to entertain and inspire the British Empire soldiers in the trenches of the Great War. In exciting stories like The Thirty-nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916) Buchan's protagonist offers a reassuring vision of a noble British hero fighting bravely against dark forces.
Marsden's work is disturbing because of the way it blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Most adventure fiction takes place safely in remote past eras, as in Rosemary Sutcliff's brilliant Eagle of the Ninth series of adventure novels, which are set in Britain in the twilight years of the Roman Empire. But Marsden's heroes are contemporary Australian teenagers, forced to confront something which would be truly terrifying. Like The War of the Worlds, the Tomorrow series is scary because it begins in normal life.
Marsden himself has said he wanted to shake young Australians out of their complacency. The deliberately jumbled tenses of Marsden's brilliant first title convey an unsettling sense of dread. The novels are starkly savage, but believable: this is really how it could be, Marsden is telling us.
I wonder what young Australian readers take away from these novels — and now, the film? They are, clearly, something more than escapist fantasies. They convey value messages, calling on young Australians to cherish our country, not to take it for granted, and to be prepared if necessary to fight — to kill and die — for it.
My problem here has to do with context. What sort of Australian readership was Marsden aiming for? No one suggests (then or now) that Australia should put out a welcome mat to any armed invasion. But the underlying xenophobic flavour of the books — against an unspecified regional invader,