The Queen of Dreams by Peter Hamilton
Published by Doubleday, January 2014
298 pages
ISBN: 978-0857533814
Review by Mark Yon
This is something a little different. Peter F. Hamilton, he of the Reality Dysfunction and the Void series, mega-sized tomes of SF space opera, has written this Young Adult Fantasy tale.
And it is different, which is presumably why the book is by Peter Hamilton, in an Iain M Banks/Iain Banks type move intended to differentiate the author’s work.
The plot is briefly summarised as follows: Agatha (Taggie) and Jemima Paganuzzi are two young sisters who go on holiday to their divorced father’s farm, Orchard Cottage, for the summer vacation. As they are settling in, the appearance of a white bespectacled squirrel seems a little unusual. Things turn stranger when they find the squirrel talks and then their dad is kidnapped down the garden well by some evil creatures doing another’s bidding… and it becomes clear that Taggie, Jemima and Felix (the aforementioned squirrel) are the ones to rescue him…
The book is fast-moving, lovingly written and clearly designed for an audience that… well, isn’t me.
However, if I was, say, a 7-12-year old girl, I suspect they would love it. The energy and frenetic pace keep the pages turning, even when the tale veers into the decidedly twee, (and I’m thinking of, as an example, the point where there is the enrolment of a certain Princess Elizabeth Windsor in 1940’s Blitz-hit London.) Generally though there’s enough charm and verve to carry the story forward over the odd bump.
As an older reader, personally I had a lot of fun spotting homages throughout the book: there’s a white squirrel wearing glasses rather like Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit, a turtle transport a little reminiscent of My Neighbour Totoro’s cat-bus, ‘gates’ that transport you – Narnia like – to other places, both in other realms as well as in the past, and a Queen that was felt to be a little Oz-like (or even Narnia-like). Being Peter F Hamilton, as well as Peter Hamilton, there’s even a little TARDIS-like time travel in the mix.
In the tradition of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights or perhaps E Nesbit’s The Railway Children, or even CS Lewis’ Narnia, the book is stridently British. I’m not quite sure how that will travel elsewhere in these global times, but the book’s place and time should be quite recognisable to many young pre-teenagers in the UK. Taggie and her sister Jemima are good, well-meaning and honourable characters that I could see many young girls being able to identify with. In the same way, the bad guys (and gals) are pleasingly boo-able.
The book throughout is filled with illustrations by Adam Stower, which add to the book rather like Quentin Blake’s drawings in Roald Dahl’s books, and which help the younger reader imagine the proceedings and the characters as the story unfolds. The cover’s an indication of his work.
And there’s a lovely character summary with those drawings at the back.
In summary, the Queen of Dreams is a good old-fashioned, yet contemporary Fantasy tale that wears its influences well and creates a rattlingly good adventure tale for wannabe princesses in the 21st century, providing you don’t think about it too deeply. I suspect that for anyone of a certain age, the story will be a book of wonders and that it will generate lots of cries of ‘just-one-more-chapter’ as it is being read out loud. There are some quite scary parts, but in the end and, as a good children’s tale should be, pretty much all’s well that ends well by its denouement (although there will be more in this series.
Good fun, but clearly for a particular reader and not for everyone. A good case of a writer broadening his usual repertoire.
Mark Yon, February 2014.
