The seventh Asterix book may not be as well-known as its predecessor, 'Asterix and Cleopatra', but it's more enjoyable to my mind. The indomitable Gauls stay at home this time out, after successive journeys over the past three books to Rome, to the rest of Gaul and to Egypt—and no travel means that they're not given an opportunity to sink the pirates' latest vessel—but that also allows René Goscinny to concentrate on what he does best, a simple story full of bad (in the best way) puns. The pun count was way down in 'Asterix in Cleopatra'. Thankfully, it's way back up again here.

It's also a chance for him to give another villager a turn in the spotlight for a change, namely their chief, Vitalstatistix, who's been a background character in a number of books with never much to do except bid our heroes farewell and welcome them home again. This remains fundamentally about Asterix and Obelix, with Getafix a pivotal supporting character, but Vitalstatistix gets far more to do as their representative in the Big Fight of the title.

And that all stems from Felonius Caucus, the devious right hand man of Nebulus Nimbus, centurion at Totorum, one of the other four Roman camps we see surrounding their village on the first page of all these books. Thus far, I believe, everything involving one of those camps has revolved around Compendium, so it's good to see one of the others getting equal treatment. Nimbus is fed up with the Gauls making fools out of his men, prompted by a patrol returning to camp in broken condition after bumping into Asterix and Obelix on a wild boar hunt, so asks Caucus for a bright idea and what he comes up with is the Big Fight.

Apparently, whenever a Gaulish chieftain wants to conquer another tribe, he doesn't invade with all his men and involve everyone in a battle, he merely challenges their chief to single combat. If he wins, he becomes the ruler of both tribes. If he loses, that honour goes to his opponent. It's all or nothing in Gaul. Whether that's remotely true or not from a historical standpoint, I don't know, but even if it was, it wouldn't have gone down like this, because Uderzo draws us a boxing ring and builds a whole funfair around it, right down to the Dodgem Chariots ride.

Now, which Gaulish chief might be crazy enough to challenge Vitalstatistix, you might ask, given a certain magic potion that guarantees that they'd lose. Well, the devious Caucus, who follows very much in the footsteps of the devious Artifis in the previous book, has a plan to address that, too. If Vitalstastistix gets his power from the magic potion brewed up by Getafix, then all they have to do is to get rid of Getafix. No druid, no magic potion, no invulnerability. And one of the local chiefs is a behemoth of a man who has fully accepted the Pax Romana and converted over to Roman ways—he doesn't just wear a toga, he has "Rome Sweet Rome" on his villa wall—and it's inconceivable to imagine him losing if invulnerability is taken off his opponent's table.

Because the fight is set up like a boxing match, this local chief is Cassius Ceramix, a take on Cassius Clay, who later became Muhammad Ali, though it's Vitalstastistix who employs his famous rope-a-dope approach. And that's because Caucus's plan proves partially successful. While the Romans do not succeed in removing Getafix from the field of play, they time their attack perfectly, at the very moment that he's run out of magic potion and so has to visit the forest to hunt down ingredients, and they get lucky. Aiming at the camouflaged Romans about to grab him, Obelix drops a menhir on him instead.

Enter a time honoured cliché: Getafix is structurally fine, what with being an indomitable Gaul and everything, but he loses his memory. And a druid who can't remember how to brew magic potion is pretty much the same as a dead druid or a kidnapped druid. Either way, Vitalstastistix is screwed and his village along with him. And, while there is one moment when I thought this might take an alternative route to the inevitable finalé, given that Cassius Ceramix issues his challenge believing that Getafix is dead, only to panic about getting out of the fight he set up when he sees the druid walking towards him, this goes pretty much exactly how we expect but with one very cool twist.

Fortunately, predictability isn't a requirement when it comes to 'Asterix' books. They don't aim to keep us in a sense of suspense. We know how they're going to end going in, which, of course, is the traditional end of book feast in the village with Cacofonix tied up somewhere in frame so he can't sing. We even know roughly how they're going to get there, via the twin joys of Asterix and Obelix beating up a whole bunch of Romans and Goscinny delivering a long succession of gloriously awful puns and other cultural jokes. There are plenty of both here, even if the Roman body count might be a tad lower than usual.

Of course, many of those puns and cultural jokes don't translate easily, so the English translators are almost worthy of a co-writer credit, fashioning new but equivalent puns and jokes to fit in the flow of a book. For most of the series, including 'Asterix and the Big Fight', they were Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. Bell was the daughter of Adrian Bell, the man who devised the first cryptic crosswords in 'The Times' and the brother of Martin Bell, famed BBC correspondent and member of parliament. However she had a long career of her own translating books from German, French and Danish. Hockridge was a French teacher at Manchester Grammar School.

In 'Asterix' books, even the names are puns, many of them new ones. The Roman who gets most to do here is a lowly legionary called Infirmofpurpus, who ends up trapped in a cauldron smelling of fish, when Getafix, who doesn't even know who he is any more, is put to work creating a series of magic potions, just in case he'll stumble on the right one, and most of them blow up. As he's sent back to spy on the Gauls, disguised as a tree, two fellow legionaries comment "He looks a bit sour!  And he smells of fish! Must be a crab apple tree!"

Needing help, Asterix and Obelix go to see Psychoanalytix, another druid who specialises in curing the mentally disturbed. Naturally, Obelix drops a menhir on him too, so doubling the problem. His receptionist is Miss Bicarbonatofsoda. I should have mentioned that Cassius Ceramix is the chief in the village of Linoleum, where there's a student by the name of Prawnsinaspix. Some of these are certainly a little dated in the decades since this came out, given that it was first serialised in 1964 in French and first published in English in 1971, but they're all still funny and some still timely.

All in all, this is a relatively straightforward 'Asterix' book, but a very welcome one for me, a home grown story that bulks up at a regular character and more of the area around the village of these indomitable Gauls. Sure, it settles for doing what these books did best without stretching that far but that's not a bad thing, especially after three adventures featuring large amounts of travel, an approach to which the series would return next, sending our hero across the water for 'Asterix in Britain', a book I'm very much looking forward to. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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