Children's Literature: Airman By Eoin Colfer Puffin, 455pp. £10.99When Eoin Colfer's sixth - and final - Artemis Fowl novel appears later this year, there will no doubt be some measure of speculation as to which direction his literary career will then turn.
To some extent, however, such speculation has been pre-empted with the publication now of Airman, a novel that, while still recognisably from the pen of Colfer, is clearly intended to signal a new development. It is a development that his huge numbers of existing fans are very likely to find enjoyable and entertaining.
Airman belongs to that species of children's historical fiction in which some of the "history" is totally factual, the rest being totally fabricated: the interplay of these two elements allows for considerable humour and irony, often given focus via a cast of picturesque characters, some of whom will have been real people, some of whom will be wholly imaginary. Colfer's assured control of both his real and fictional worlds is such that their union is very happy indeed.
Set, with loving attention to the topographical detail, on the Saltee Islands off Colfer's native Wexford coast, the novel asks us to imagine a situation where the islands are an independent kingdom. We are in the closing years of the 19th century and Nicholas the First (or "Good King Nick") is on the Saltee throne, with his daughter, the Princess Isabella, close at hand. The islands' prosperity lies in their diamond-mining industry, based on the island of Little Saltee, also the site of the local prison. It is in this quite dreadful place of incarceration that the story's hero, 14-year-old Conor Broekhart, is forced by cruel circumstances to pass two extremely wretched years.
But is from here also that he is to make the wonderfully dramatic escape that gives Colfer's novel its principal narrative raison d'être. For Conor's obsession, since his birth in a hot air balloon at the Paris World Fair of 1878, has been with flying and with the desire to be the first person to take to the skies. The process of gratifying his obsession and fulfilling his ambition will see him survive numerous obstacles, the most thwarting of which will emanate from one Marshall Hugo Bonvilain of the Saltee Holy Cross Guard, "an unusual combination of warrior and wit".
Wit, albeit of a more refined and subtle variety than in Colfer's Artemis novels, is here in abundance; the interest in gadgetry, its design and its functioning remains also. With, at times, echoes of the legend of Icarus and strongly redolent throughout of the tone of a Victorian boys' adventure story, Airman really is a ripping yarn, with some excellent writing, notably in its concluding chapters. Colfer, we might well say, is flying high.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading