Cherub: The General, by John Muchamore

Cherub: The General Robert Muchamore, Hodder Children’s Books UK, 329 pages, paperback, NZ$34.99. [NZ agents: Hachette Livre, PO Box 100-749, North Shore Mail centre, Auckland 1333, NZ]

Young man’s fancy

“A young man is much like a cat,” Kazakov smiled ruefully. “He wants food, sex and fun.”

Kazakov, a Ukrainian survivor of the Soviet Union's Afghanistan campaign, helps train the teenage agents of Cherub in spying and sabotage. James (16) is a typical agent. After rioting and looting in London, he helps Kazakov defeat US troops in a desert war game and cheat a fortune from a Las Vegas casino.

The Cherub series is a boy’s fantasy world, offering military trappings, girls, a bathroom well supplied with condoms, no parents, and lashings of violence. There are already ten volumes in this nasty series with more on the way.


Trevor Agnew

This review was first published in Your Weekend magazine on 20 Sep 2008.

Cherub's website is: www.cherubcampus.com

Hamlet: a novel, by John Marsden

Hamlet: a novel John Marsden, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, 228 pages, hardback, NZ $35. ISBN 978-1-921351-47-1

Just as Shakespeare created his finest play from earlier stories, so John Marsden now draws from Hamlet to create his finest novel. Marsden’s Hamlet: a novel is an inspired retelling, from a youthful viewpoint. Some of the most powerful scenes come straight from Marsden’s imagination: Hamlet and Laertes, teenagers painting Ophelia’s room, begin play-duelling with paint brushes.

Carefully told so as to be timeless, it is also fresh. Marsden’s paraphrases of the great speeches lose their poetry but gain a sharp edge. “Don’t lend money,” warns Polonius, “Don’t borrow money.” This does not detract from Shakespeare but will draw young readers to experience the play.

A new generation’s first contact with Hamlet will come through John Marsden’s novel.

Trevor Agnew

This review was first published in Your Weekend magazine on 13 September 2008.

Where Underpants Come from, by Joe Bennett

WHERE UNDERPANTS COME FROM Joe Bennett, Simon and Schuster [NZ agents HarperCollins], 258 pages, 2008, paperback, NZ $32.99
ISBN 978-1-84737-001-3

The only drawback I feared with this book was that the publicity for it would inevitably involve photographs of Joe and his dog with a pair of underpants between them. In fact, The Press has already published the first of these and I have to admit they were looking pretty good: Joe, the dog and the underpants. Functional rather than elegant, the three of them.

Then when I read the book, I found a withers-wringing description of Joe stripping to the aforesaid grundies in a cotton field near Urumqi in the Xijiang Uighur Autonomous Region, “the Tibet that the West doesn’t bother to protest about.” Racked by guilt and watched by farmers in Muslim skull-caps, Joe poses for publicity photographs in his Cambridge-blue underpants. He (unfairly) flagellates himself as “superficial and a parasite…a harmless buffoon who is aware of his own buffoonery.” It’s a long way from The Warehouse in Christchurch, where Joe’s quest began with the purchase of a pack of five underpants for only NZ$8.59.

When he has the bright idea of writing a book about pursuing his underpants back to the manufacturing and agricultural origins of their various elements, his agent is swift to respond: “Joe, it’s a crap idea.” but it was actually an inspired idea. I was delighted that he persisted with his odyssey from supermarket shelf to cotton field because Where Underpants Come From brings face-to-face two of the great enigmas of our time: Joe Bennett and China. Each baffles the other as he burrows into China’s factories, bars, ports and farms. Whether he’s in the top bunk of a bus or having his train seat snaffled by soldiers, Joe is a brilliant reporter, with a gift for the right phrase. “China doesn’t have motorbike gangs. China is a motorbike gang.” That epigram will ring true with anyone who has ever crossed a Chinese city street.

When he sees peasants working in the picturesque fields, his reactions are honest: “I recoil from the hardship.” He is also perceptive: “I see no one in the fields under thirty years of age.” We meet the missing young when Joe reaches Shanghai’s clothing factories and he encounters many more interesting folk along the way. We also learn that, given the right observer, a pair of underpants can indeed contain a universe.

My response to this book is identical to Joe’s response to China: “I hadn’t expected to smile that much.”

Trevor Agnew