Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London

I must admit my heart sank slightly as I opened Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London; science fiction is not really my cup of – quarks? But this is an intelligent, engaging addition to the genre, with a likeable hero in the person of Johnny, who is accompanied by his pet dog, Bentley.

The opening scenes find him in a children’s home, Halader House, in the curious position of being a quasi-orphan: his father is in prison on a trumped-up charge, while his mother is hospitalised in an apparently permanent coma. So far, so grim, but despite the Dickensian cook figure, Mr Wilkins, this is no Dotheboys Hall and the narrative immediately establishes Johnny as resourceful character with special gifts. A strange pattern of freckles on his left arm echoes the shape of the Cassiopeia constellation and all his life Johnny has felt an affinity with deep space. He has customised the school computer to create his own operating system, KOVAC (Keyboard Or Voice-Activated Computer) and has programmed it to search for extraterrestrial signals. His searches are proving fruitless, when a routine visit to his mother leaves him in possession of a locket with his own photograph and that of a mystery girl, Clara. KOVAC helps him to locate her school, The Proteus School for the Gifted. It is deep in the countryside, where Clara is a star pupil. But like his mother’s hospital ward the school is heavily guarded – and menacing Mr Stevens, who seems to dog Johnny’s footsteps wherever he goes, turns up here too. In an effort to evade capture by Stevens, Johnny and Clara flee into a lift and find themselves precipitated into space and into the hands of the krun, an alien race to which Stevens belongs…

While individual episodes in the story have an internal coherence, I found the coils of the plot confusing at times and felt that packing the story so densely left me groping for the key narrative: Johnny and Clara’s search for the truth about their parents and identity. However this switchback structure may be precisely what engages young readers, together with an infectious energy in the writing style. The author’s afterword hints at more adventures of Johnny to come, which may flesh out the tantalising space-histories of Johnny and Clara’s parents, sketched here.