Johnny and the Bomb

Pratchett takes the surreality of time travel theory to an extreme, as he explores his oft-mentioned theories about the trousers of time.

Johnny Maxwell and his friends do a bit of time travelling, aided by the strange supermarket trolley owned by the even stranger Mrs Tachyon. They find themselves in 1941, immediately prior to an air raid which Johnny had studied for a history project.

Not as funny as the Bromeliad trilogy, or as clever as Discworld, but I still found this eminently readable and decidedly mind-boggling. Three and a half stars, really.

In my favorite of the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, Johnny crosses paths with Mrs. Tachyon, a bag lady who also is a time traveller. He and his friends travel back to WWII in their town with the predictable changing of time that must be fixed. However, instead of simply changing time back to its previous path, Johnny wants to prevent a bomb wiping out Paradise Street in the middle of the night. This necessitates a lot of maneuvering by the kids with the usual humorous Pratchett twists and turns along the way. I was surprised at what a page turner it became by the end as I stayed up way past bedtime to get Johnny and his pals home again.

Amazingly, this book took eleven years from its UK publication to be published in the US, appearing here in 2007. The version I read was the US one, whose Americanization has its dumber moments: I did at least a triple take when there was mention of the High Street being littered with, among other typical items, empty "chip packets". Just to add to the conceptual confusion, later in the book at least one discarded packet of fish and chips played a minor role; I had to be grateful for the small mercy that this didn't become "fish and fries".

Such quirks -- and they're few -- don't really detract from the enjoyability of the book, which is considerable. Young Johnny Maxwell and his pals Wobbler, Yo-less, Bigmac and Kirsty, know old Mrs show more Tachyon as one of Blackbury's characters: babbling battily and pushing her decrepit supermarket trolley around town, her vicious cat Guilty aboard it among the numerous mysterious black plastic bags, the bag lady is hard to miss. When she's involved in an accident and has to be rushed to hospital, Johnny takes cart, bags and cat home for safekeeping in the family garage. Inadvertently manipulating one of the bags, he undergoes what one might call a spontaneous time-travel experience. It seems that what Mrs Tachyon has been storing in her bags is time. A little later, in a more controlled experiment, Johnny takes his chums with him, and they find they're in Blackbury as it was in 1941; moreover, Johnny realizes that it's not just any day in 1941 but the day leading up to the night he's just been reading about for his school history project, the night when a German bombing mission, off course, dropped its load on Blackbury's Paradise Street, causing huge damage and the loss of many lives.

Kirsty is the brains of the group; she's also widely regarded as insufferable, because of her intelligence, her pronounced feminism, and her pushiness . . . so I loved the character most of any in the book She has numerous good lines, but none (in my opinion) better than the one she comes out with on the pals' arrival in 1941:

"Oh dear, it's going to be that kind of adventure after all," she hissed, sitting up. "It's just the sort of thing I didn't want to happen. Me, and four token boys. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It's only a mercy we haven't got a dog." (p83)

Johnny is keen to avert the night's tragedy; even so, he's aware of the Trousers of Time effect, that if you alter something in the past you can find yourself going down the wrong leg of the Trousers to arrive in a different future from the one you expected. Indeed, exactly this happens during the pals' various adventures when Wobbler, who's got separated from the rest, unwittingly manages to make his own grandfather (who at the time of encounter is Richmal Crompton's William Brown in all but name) a victim of the bombing raid, thereby cancelling out his own existence in a future to which the rest of the kids briefly return. (The section of the book featuring this subtly different alternative future is especially nicely handled.) In the end Johnny realizes the challenge is to get the air raid siren sounded in time that, while Paradise Road and its nearby pickle factory are destroyed, just as the old newspaper he read for his school project told him, the residents are able to get to their shelters. But this isn't as easy as it sounds, because the switch for the siren is in the police station in town, and will not be pulled until the rozzers hear from the lookout post on a distant hill; the storm that has misled the German bombers has blown out the phone from the lookout post, and the backup motorbike there won't start . . .

Like all the best kids' books, this holds as much to engage adults as most adult novels do, if not more. As noted, Kirsty's a joy; also wonderful among the characters is Yo-less, who's black but also, clashing with ignorant racial stereotypes, the class nerd -- a nerd so nerdish that, as is observed somewhere in the text, if you gave him a baseball cap he'd put it on the right way round. In connection with Yo-less, the book refreshingly confronts casual racism, in both past and present Blackbury, face-on: people do not mean their remarks and attitudes about Yo-less unkindly, not really, but they're fucking offensive all the same. At first Kirsty makes the excuse for them that "it's only the way they've been brought up" and tells Yo-less not to worry; but then, when she encounters some 1940s casual sexism, he tosses the same line back at her and she gets the point. The time-travel aspects of the tale are neatly worked out, as are the potentials for paradox. Much recommended. show less

Good fun, though naturally not as fantastic as Pratchett's Discworld novels. Johnny would actually fit in well in Ankh-Morpork -- maybe as one of Vimes' guards when he's older? He's appealing, resourceful, and not full of himself. And unlike Rincewind, he's brave enough to not run away from the situations that keep cropping up, even when it involves trying to fix timelines gone awry (with some help from his motley crew of friends). I hope there is another Johnny Maxwell book somewhere among Pratchett's papers, because the universe is a better place with these stories in it.

Johnny and the Bomb. So very clever, so very accurate, so very casual, a daft, funny time-travelling young adult yarn.. .. .. .. and yet .. .. Nobody is who they think they are, or where they think they are. Brilliant stuff.

"This book is the third in Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trillogy, and while Only You Can Save Mankind is still my favorite, I loved this one too. Like all Pratchett, you'll get lovely layers of humor, a deep sense of humanity, and a fun, tightly woven plot. Recommende for all readers."

Pratchett starts off again by taking an off-the-cuff saying literally. What if you really had "bags of time"?

What would you do? Where and when would you go? And if you had the chance to change something, would you?