Diligent scholarship offers one path to success, but high-jinks can take students far too. Shenanigans by Jim and his pal Charlie, young heroes in Mark Haddon's novel, Boom! Or 70,000 Light Years (2009, David Fickling Books, 195 pages), land them on the plant Plonk in the distant Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy.
Fast-paced and exciting, this science-fiction adventure pleases youngsters, but adults can enjoy it too. Who wouldn't like a plot that has aliens teaching school and abducting people to repopulate their distant world?
The story opens with Jim, the narrator, on an urban balcony when a familiar motorcycle pulls up below. Accidentally on-purpose a jam-sandwich goes over the railing. “The slice wobbled and flipped and veered left and veered right. Craterface turned off the engine, got off the bike, removed his helmet and looked up towards the flat. I felt sick. The slice hit him in the face and stuck, jammy side down.”
Does the book's central theme involve sandwiches? “Dad joined me five minutes later. He leaned on the railings beside me and gazed out into the darkness. ‘Life's a cowpat sandwich, Jimbo,’ he sighed, ‘with very thin bread and a lot of filling.’ ”
The adventurous British student-protagonists hide a walkie-talkie in the school staff-room. “ ‘Course it's risky,’ said Charlie, shrugging his shoulders. ‘It wouldn't be any fun if it wasn't risky.’ ”
When two teachers suddenly converse in an odd lingo, the boys launch a bumbling investigation. At first, the “suspects” deny knowing any “foreign” language. “ ‘But languages.... Well, it's in one ear and out the other. I tried learning a bit of French in Brittany last year, but I sounded like an idiot. And if I'm going to sound like an idiot, I'd prefer to do it in my own language.’ ”
Back in 1992, this same story appeared with a different title, Gridzbi Spudvetch! (alien words). “It was a ridiculous thing to call a book,” says Haddon. “No one knew how to pronounce it. And no one knew what it meant until they'd read the story. As a result, only 23 people bought the book. Actually, that's an exaggeration, but not much. It rapidly went out of print.”
Re-named and rewritten, the book makes pleasant reading. Waving a scalpel-like red pencil, the author “cut large sections and added new ones”, changing “pretty much every sentence in the book”. The new title “means something even if you haven't read the story. And everyone can pronounce it.”
The “booms” behind the new title ring out in a remote part in Scotland. “We headed into the hills. There was a village or two. But mostly there were mountains, grass, lochs, cattle, sheep, rock and more mountains. It looked like the Land That Time Forgot. If you closed your ears to the roar of the Moto Guzzi, you could imagine a brontosaurus lumbering out of a valley between two cloudy peaks.”
Then: “Suddenly, there was an ear-splitting boom! like no boom! I'd ever heard. It made my head wobble. It made my stomach wobble. It made my toes wobble. The light went off. The boom! echoed back off the faraway mountains and slowly died away to silence.”
A noisy, blue-lit transport-device blasts passengers through outer space to Plonk. “The atoms in my body slowly stopped vibrating. My ears still hurt, but the nausea was fading. I got slowly to my feet. The word ZARVOIT flashed across the screen and there was a short bing-bong like a doorbell. I heard a little hiss and turned to see that one of the sides of the tube was sliding open!”
Exotic Plonk has domesticated spiders the size of big dogs, hoover scooters and two suns. Naturally, Jim and Charlie endure culture shock. “No trees, no grass, no water. Just rocks and dust and craters. I turned to look out the other side of the bridge. And what I saw was much, much worse. There were two suns. And they were green.”
Luckily, the boys retain a sense of humor. Even with the Earth's future at risk, they can joke. “Vantresillion leaned over and pulled a black box into the centre of the desk. There were a series of buttons on the box. He placed his finger on the red one. ‘I press this,’ he said, ‘and your planet blows up. No Eiffel Tower. No Great Wall of China. Just a load of smoking rocks in space.’
‘What do the other ones do?’ asked Charlie. ‘Do they make cappuccino?’ ”
A leading British author, Haddon has scored past success with humorous stories for adults that youngsters enjoy too, notably The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother. In Boom!, the dust settles on another enjoyable experience for readers of all ages.
Approval rating: 79 per cent.
For more information: www.markhaddon.com or www.davidficklingbooks.co.uk
(January 30, 2012)
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