Boom!

Mark Haddon had served a long and varied literary apprenticeship before hitting the world’s headlines in 2003 with what was to become his best known title, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Among his earlier works was a 1993 novel, Gridzbi Spudvetch!, which, some 16 years later, is now resurrected, in re-edited and updated form, as Boom! (The exclamation marks remain!) In essence, the narrative delivers an energetically paced adventure story, in which two friends, Jim and Charlie, play out the consequences of eavesdropping on a conversation between two of their teachers, the weird element of the conversation being that it is all expressed in what seems to the boys to be a secret, coded language. Their determination to solve the mystery of the overheard exchange leads the boys (and their friend Becky) to some very strange encounters with equally strange males, females and non-humans, apparently culminating in a trek to the Isle of Skye – though this is merely the prelude to a sequence of extra-terrestrial experiences on a planet called Plonk in ‘the Sagittarian Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy’. The book’s humour, starting rather quietly (and indeed in a context which has interesting and more serious insights into parent, child and teacher relationships), develops a tone which becomes breathlessly frenetic and threatens to spin out of control; but many young readers will enjoy it.