Times Book review by Amanda Craig
At 104 pages long, Once Upon a Time in the North is both a compelling adventure and the kind of philosophical game familiar from the author's shorter novels (I Was A Rat!, Count Karlstein and Clockwork). There are bills of lading, extracts from Lee's half-destroyed book on The Elements of Aerial Navigation, a fallacious newspaper report and a board game at the back about getting your balloon as close to the Pole without being "sucked into a terrible and certain death in the Polar Maelstrom". Compared with the epic Miltonic grandeur of His Dark Materials we get more of a Blake poem... ...
Leave a comment