Cover art: David Dean
‘The Neanderthal stares blankly at me. In the darkness of his eyes all I can see is my own reflection.’ (p153)
Game on
This Escape Room has many levels. As a game it is puzzling, fast-paced, engaging, unexpected, and intensely thrilling. Yet the story’s protagonists are participants as well as players, and, for them and the empathetic reader, it is perplexing, disturbing, terrifying, devastating and literally a matter of life and death. Further still, Christopher Edge is no writer of simple pot-boilers. Through a whole sequence of recent brilliant novels, he has more than proved himself as an ingenious, imaginative and deeply concerned writer, asking some of life’s biggest questions. This book is also a journey through ideas, provoking and probing at levels far deeper than those of the arcade.
Like others of his recent titles, it holds many surprises, shocks, twists and revelations, that it would be wrong to reveal in a review. It is tempting to say simply that this game is not what it seems, but even that is not completely true, because, as the reader of the book, and the players of the game, are repeatedly told, there are clues to be found throughout by those who have eyes (and minds) to see.
And the winner is
Every stage of the story is loaded with the most vivid and powerful images, products and stimulants of rich imagination. Images of what? That is for each reader to decide. But who, for example, can miss the butterflies. They not only crop up unexpectedly in the text, but it is they, and not vicious monsters or resurrected corpses. that swarm across every chapter head. Are they fluttering towards Escape?
For Christopher Edge Escape Room is a multiple triumph. It will fly from the shelves and into children’s imaginations as a crazy, thrilling, rip-roaring ‘Indiana Jones’ adventure game. (Supported by David Dean’s outstanding cover.) However this new novel also further confirms this author’s already outstanding reputation as one of our finest contemporary children’s writers, original, thoughtful, provocative - truly psychedelic. Having been drawn in by the game, many young readers will understand that it isn’t a game at all; that it isn’t about finding the answer and saving the world, it’s about finding the answer and saving the world.
Christopher Edge is a certain winner here, but even more so are his young readers.