Ravenwood

The remote, tree-covered island of Arborium is far more valuable than its population knows. Wood has almost disappeared from the planet, but here forests thrive. Ark Malikum and his family live with their fellow Dendrans up in the treetops, a mile above ground, in a kingdom of scaffolded walkways, hovels and palaces, paupers and princes. Or, in Ark’s case, plumbers.

The story is driven by greed; devious outsiders want Arborium’s timber and ruthless insiders want to topple old King Quercus and grab power. (The chief baddie is called Grasp.) Young Ark and his burly mate Mucum get tangled up in the struggle and long tracts of the book are taken up with the boys being hounded by a couple of lumbering thugs called Silex and Alnus (close kin to the Broker’s Men); when these two are not on the scent, the lads are being hunted, more dangerously, by the overweight Petronio, Grasp’s ambitious and distinctly nasty son.

Peters can tell a cracking story, no doubt. But – maybe it is the performance poet in him – he insists on an obvious, often scatological humour which his story and his young readers really don’t need. The pages are covered in squit, poo and doo-doo, and there’s a good deal of action involving drains, soil pipes, sewage and squit-cannons. ‘Squit-features’ is a standard insult. It doesn’t take loads of shit (and a dollop of graphic gore for good measure) to excite or amuse children. And how many tree-puns can you take? ‘A bunch of make-be-leaf’, ‘Oaky-Doaky’, ‘the River Sticks’, ‘run holly-for-leather’ – and hundreds more where those came from. ‘Buddy Holly’ is a Dendran oath, though it might be tricky for 2011 young readers to get the reference. This would have been a stronger novel – an original, fast-paced, well-plotted novel – without the laboured humour which inevitably cloys the prose. Fair enough – many children may initially enjoy the naughty squit stuff and the puns, but to go on and on along this path seems condescending and arch.