Borgon the Axeboy and the Whispering Temple (Borgon the Axeboy 3) by Kjartan Poskitt and Philip Reeve
| Borgon the Axeboy and the Whispering Temple (Borgon the Axeboy 3) by Kjartan Poskitt and Philip Reeve | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: The third in this ongoing series seems to have lost some of the magic of the first, in favour for PG gross-out silliness, but is still worth a look. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 176 | Date: July 2015 |
| Publisher: Faber and Faber | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9780571307371 | |
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The middle's nice and crunchy but the squishy bits are horrible. No, that's not a predator in prehistoric times discussing the eating of us humans. Instead, it's Borgon the Axeboy's mother, discussing peaches. Yes, even in a world where a lot of nasty animals are still around to potentially eat the likes of Borgon, there are still things for people to learn. Borgon for one, in this third adventure in the series, has a lot to learn about religion – he scoffs at the idea there's a god resident in a temple he and his friends have discovered, even if his friend Hunjah insists otherwise. The lesson is forced and the truth comes out, however, when some thieves turn up, having pegged the site as a location of many earthly riches…
Having been surprisingly entertained by the first in the series, I was a little disappointed with this volume. It lost some of the cleverness inherent in the writing, and that the audience was made to feel, with the naïve simplicity of Borgon and the other prehistoric humans. Here there's not so much for them to do, except eat peaches the wrong way (and a whole hippopotamus), and quibble about the godly nature of the happenings in the temple. I was even unimpressed with Grizzy the intelligent girl and what she got up to, being ahead of her in her allegedly clever decisions.
Still, add the thieves into the mix, pepper the page with some other dunderhead humans, and put a sprightly character on to everything (even a passing snake) and there is some appeal. The drama takes longer than expected to settle down into the battle for the temple's contents, but when it does it's quite jolly and enjoyable. How enjoyable you decide it is will in the end boil down to how you like your mysteries leavened by gross-out humour, of a kind and purpose I'll let you find out for yourself.
Don't get me wrong, there was little at fault per se with this volume, and the target audience will see me as an old curmudgeon and lick their lips at the idea of a fourth book. But I was expecting a greater dose of the arch humour of before, the world of the characters being so ridiculously primitive yet easy to see in the mind's eye. Here there was a shortfall where the effect of that primitive nature is concerned, an imbalance in what I think are the series' merits, and an edge missing from the quality of the storytelling. The series isn't one to abandon or discard completely, but Mr Poskitt has provided us with much better before now.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
More juvenile silliness – using both words to their maximum positivity – can be had with another ongoing series, that which contains Attack of the Giant Sea Spiders (Adventures of the Steampunk Pirates) by Gareth P Jones.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Borgon the Axeboy and the Whispering Temple (Borgon the Axeboy 3) by Kjartan Poskitt and Philip Reeve at Amazon.com.
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