The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 15 January 2009
by Angus MacVicar
Boys books are full of adventure, action and, depending on the targeted reading level or the character of the author, also full of danger and disaster. They're adventures and sometimes morality plays. There's a little bit of both in this novel from 1957, which was part of a series by Angus MacVicar. The Atom Chasers are a trio of boys from Scotland who had previously teamed up to capture a spy who was stealing secrets from a British nuclear power station. They meet an energetic American publisher who has heard of a great Book of Wisdom secreted away in Tibet. He plans to get a copy of the book and publish it, bringing the wisdom of the East to the rest of the world in troubled times at the height of the Cold War. This is light reading, and the kids get ready approval for their treacherous journey, first by plane and then by foot through the mountains of Tibet. They are joined by the Major, a blustery British partisan, and by Norbu, a young Tibetan studying medicine in London. Norbu is hired on as an interpreter, but he doesn't get the chance to do any interpreting. When the team arrives, almost disastrously, in the snowy Himalaya, they find that every Tibetan they meet speaks English. They encounter the viceroy of a small town who was trained in England and whose daughter speaks English. They are ambushed by an English-speaking brigand. They are saved by an English-speaking monk, and taken to a monastery where all the monks speak English and walk around in western style tunics. If, by half way through the book, the reader doesn't see where this is going, then he isn't reading very closely. Along with the Major, who represents the last of the British Empire, the author suggests that all that is good in the East originated in the West, and via Western cultural and religious missionaries. While there are many points in which Tibetan culture peeks through in the story, most of the book gets it wrong. It is a Shangri-La fantasy in the vein of Lost Horizon, in which the East doesn't have its own mysteries to bring to the West. It is as if Tibet's own knowledge and culture are inherently if subtly inferior. It almost goes without saying that the occupation of Tibet by the Chinese (recent at the time of this book's publication) gets hardly a mention. The Atom Chasers' adventure is fraught with peril, but not a realistic peril. The altitude, the cold, the presence of the Peoples Liberation Army; none of these affect their journey. Not even the language barrier is any trouble (like a Star Trek episode). And so, this is a fantasy, a mildly entertaining book for boys whose content suffers, somewhat, from the half-century of history that has passed since it came out. Don't look too closely for any cultural, historical, or even geographical detail.
See Also: [Lost Horizon by James Hilton]