The Constellation of Sylvie

Townley’s ‘Sylvie’ trilogy, starting with The Great Good Thing and continuing with Into the Labyrinth, now concludes with the title under review here. The location switches from the ‘inner space’ and ‘cyberspace’, respectively, of the earlier novels to ‘outer space’, as we follow Princess Sylvie and her friends on a spaceship voyage to Jupiter, witness their subsequent entrapment aboard and become involved in the dilemma as to how they may, or may not, return to Earth. As readers of the previous Townley fictions will know, their principal novelty is in their being stories about stories, populated by characters who are themselves aware of their status as fictional characters. This is a novelty which for many readers is likely to prove as irritating as, no doubt, it will prove attractive to others; it certainly has the potential to raise some interesting questions about the nature of the relationship between reader and text. These metafictional considerations apart, Townley’s novel has enough moments of drama and excitement to appeal to the young reader in spite, perhaps, of a cast of ‘characters’ in whom one never, quite, believes.