Eoin Colfer, Airman
Puffin £10.99
We all dream of flying, and none more so than the boys who (like my own son) got one of those ace remote-controlled aeroplanes that the Science Museum now excels at. Yet where other generations took flight with tales from Babar to Jules Verne our own generation prefer to reflect on the fate of Icarus instead. Philip Pullman has a splendid aeronaut in His Dark Materials, and Kenneth Oppel wrote Airborn and its magnificent sequel Skybreaker, but it pretty much seemed as if 9/11 and the ineptitude of Heathrow put paid to the romance of flying for good. Happily, it is not so.
Best-known for his terrific techno-fairies in the Artemis Fowl series, Eoin Colfer has come up with an entirely different hero in Conor Broekhart, a boy born in a hot air balloon who becomes obsessed with flying. His father is Captain of the Sharpshooter, working for the king of two real-life islands off the west coast of Ireland, the Saltees, where fantastical diamond mines have made the reigning Trudeau family immensely rich. The Saltees are a backwater, trading diamonds for everything they need. If they can transport the diamonds by air rather than sea, the islands can be transformed.
Far too cute in the opening chapters, Conor rescues the King’s daughter from a tower seconds before it is blown up. Brilliant at fencing, a budding inventor, adored by pretty Princess Isabella and made a knight as a mere boy – I could hear the 11-year-old boys retching into their school-bags. Mercifully, everything in young Conor’s charmed life goes wrong. Save your book tokens and fasten your seat-belts, because in Chapter Four, Airman takes off into a genuine blast of a tale.
The Trudeau family’s rivals have always been the Bonvilains, and once Conor is fourteen, the treacherous Bonvilain murders the King and Conor’s best adult friend, the French inventor and fencing teacher Victor. While the Broekharts are made to believe that their son has died defending them, Conor’s face is masked by a “lunatic box” and he is sent pseudonymously to Little Saltee as a regicide and murderer. Nobody has ever escaped the island, which is run by a sadistic bunch of guards and criminals, under the bullying Billtoe.
If you think you spot not one but two novels by Dumas pere et fils, you are right. The Man in the Iron Mask meets The Count of Monte Cristo, and Conor realises that the next time he must kill his tormentor, using his fencing skills. His aerial escape from the island, acquisition of a fortune in diamonds and eventual return to rescue Isabella and his family is pure cheese, which Steven Speilberg should instantly, and gratefully, snap up.
Colfer’s witty fluency needs a stronger editorial hand to make the next book in the series as taut as it should be. Poor Edmond Dantes was enriched in every sense by his burning desire of vengeance in the Chateau d’If, and even Phileas Fogg lost his starch when he fell for his Indian widow. A few more foibles would make the “visionary” Broekhart more like the kind of hero whom girls fall in love with and boys want to be.
Meanwhile, better fun than this will be hard to come by. Airman will waft you over the shallows of the forthcoming Year of Literacy, and out into the wine-dark seas of true adventure. Enjoy it while it lasts.