The Black Tattoo

‘He thought about God, and the god who’d created God, and the god who’d created the god who created God, and so on… He thought, in that moment, about the meaning of it all – and wondered, briefly, whether there actually was one.’ Such ruminations may not, perhaps, be the everyday preoccupations of a 14-year-old boy, but for Jack, in this debut novel, they arise quite convincingly towards the end of a remarkable adventure. This has seen him, his friend Charlie and Esme – ‘the most beautiful girl he (Jack) had ever seen’ – lured into the depths of Hell, encounter an apparently infinite number of its weird denizens, engage in gladiatorial contests of considerable ferocity – and all in the interests of saving the universe from the sleeping Dragon on whose back, we are assured, all Hell is built. There are no limits to the inventiveness or imagination on which Enthoven has drawn in creating this Stygian landscape and its inhabitants, but some readers will find that just as engaging is the development of the relationships among the three young people at the centre of the narrative. Imagine a literary world where Philip Pullman meets Darren Shan and you have some of the flavour of this ambitious (and lengthy) novel. RD