Snatched!
by Graham Marks
Junior
Usborne
Paperback
£5.99
ISBN: 0746068409
Buy this book from Amazon UK
The Secret History of
Tom Trueheart, Boy Adventurer
Buy this book from Amazon UK
Buy this book from Amazon UKAction and adventure, the bright face of danger, come in many disguises. Here are two novels which share many features of the genre: a boy hero, a perilous starting point, a testing struggle against huge odds and baleful forces, an outcome doubtful until the very last and a final resolution which leaves the hero with every question answered and his conduct thoroughly justified. And yet few novels could be more different in intention and texture.
Snatched! is set in a travelling circus in the 1850s. Danny is twelve. He appears in the ring as Crown Prince Juan Pablo of Nicobar and his horse Savage becomes Ozymandias, his magnificent Arab stallion. Danny is a marvellous horseman; he is also an orphan, mysteriously abandoned as a baby on the night of a huge storm in the lion's' den ' which is why he was named Daniel.
The circus owner, Mr Hubble, known as 'Bruise' because he used to be a prizefighter, adopts him as his own son and gives him to Billy Jiggs and his wife Hannah to bring up. Danny has brought a mystery with him and also The Eye, a disturbing ability to dream the future 'and once, crucially, the past. The mystery appears to be on the point of being solved when a stranger, a red-headed woman, comes to the circus; however, this only starts the great adventure, in which Bruise resolves a problem from his past and Danny finds his mother with consequences he did not expect.
This is a fast-moving, well-written story, full of the atmosphere of the circus - a sort of other-worldliness which helps us accept Danny's powers of divination - and with vivid characters who stay in the mind long after the book is closed. It is a terrific read, gripping and intriguing to the end.
Playful is not one of the many approving adjectives Snatched! can be given. However it certainly applies to the The Secret History of Tom Trueheart, Boy Adventurer. Tom''s adventures take him into many hairy situations from which he emerges successfully through his own resource and bravery: in this respect it fully serves inclusion within the adventure genre. After that, we are on strange territory. The book is a beautiful piece of post-modernism, with the same playful (there's no other word for it) response to literature that Jasper Fforde brings to his adult novels about Thursday Next, literary detective, and Inspector Jack Sprat of the Nursery Crimes Division.
Tom has six elder brothers, all named Jack and all true adventurers. From time to time they are given orders by the mysterious Story Bureau to leave for the Land of Stories, where their task is to be the hero of yet another fairy story, which they must bring to its proper conclusion.. Brother J Ormestone is a senior story deviser: his job is to set up the plots for each story. However, he is consumed with corroding jealousy because the hero -' always one of Tom''s brothers - emerges as Jack the Giant-killer or whoever and becomes the one part of the story everybody remembers.
Ormestone wants the credit for himself, not the characters (an interesting sidelight on an author''s attitude to his own creations), so he enters the stories themselves and treacherously removes each adventurer before the crucial event - the waking of the princess, the finding of the glass slipper - can occur.
Tom receives orders from the Story Bureau via Jollity Brownfield, an apprentice sprite, disguised as a crow. He is to travel to all ends of the Land of Stories, find his brothers and make the stories finish as they should. How he succeeds makes a truly satisfying, elegantly written and often very funny book: at the end, Ormestone is left outcast and angry, plotting revenge, and Tom is thinking of his father, lost years ago on a similar adventure! The stage is set for a sequel and I will be first in the queue to read it.