This is a handsome, very pickupable book. Brightly and informatively jacketed, its text punctuated by lovely, fluid ink and wash illustrations by Michael Foreman, it deserves a prominent place on school library bookshelves and, if there is any justice in the world, in bookshops.

The novel is another variation on Morpurgo's favourite and morally unambiguous theme: the innocent courage of animals caught up in acts of human barbarism. (Morpurgo and his publishers must have been tempted to call it War Elephant.)

Its initiating event is one of the most cynical war crimes of the last century: the fire-bombing of Dresden by the RAF in 1945. A family  a mother, her teenage daughter, her young son and an elephant called Marlene  flee westwards from the holocaust and from the advancing Russian armies. (I should explain the elephant. The mother, a volunteer zoo-keeper, has sheltered it in the family garden to save it from being mercy-shot when the bombs descend.)

They set off into territory already mapped by other  and dare I say better  writers: Ian Serraillier, Kurt Vonnegut, Leslie Wilson. On their refugee odyssey the family meets characters who all seem vaguely familiar: the downed RAF officer hiding in a barn; the dislocated school choir; the aristocratic Good German; the mechanised American cavalry appearing over the horizon. ("Holy Cow," they say when they see the elephant. Which is nice.)

Marlene is the heroine. Morpurgo stops just short of anthropomorphisation, but she is a sort of pachyderm Mother Courage. Plodding, obdurate, opportunistic, load-bearing, indestructible, cheering, she represents the stubborn human will to survive.

The story is narrated by the now aged daughter from her bed in a Canadian nursing home. Her audience is her nurse and her nurse's son, Karl. At its end she gives Karl her late husband's RAF compass. This is an elegant and pleasing metaphor; the compass is a moral as well as a navigational tool. But her true bequest is her story, as Morpurgo makes clear. Like the elephant, we should never forget the past, nor forget that the elderly are its gatekeepers. All this is told in the author's familiar style, which is as plain as an Amish wardrobe.

Morpurgo is a literary landmark, a national treasure. To suggest that his writing (as distinct from his story-telling) lacks thunder and sparkle, or even originality, is akin to complaining that Stonehenge has no roof. His plainness is deliberate and crafted. All the same, I find myself wishing that his language would occasionally stretch and challenge his loyal young readers. Sometimes, it seems to me, he sells himself short.

In this novel, which ends happily all round, the postwar resolutions, the fates of his characters, are dealt with not so much simply as perfunctorily. Its ending is scarcely more than "They all lived happily ever after". Morpurgo knows this, of course, and tells us so. As in some of his earlier novels, a young listener urges the story onward. "And? And? What happened? What happened after that?" To which the narrator replies: "Oh, a lot happened. A whole lifetime of happenings. But I think I shall keep it short. I am suddenly rather tired." Indeed.

Mal Peet's Exposure is published by Walker.