Oh dear, oh dear. While 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' is a classic children's novel, maybe with a little nastiness that's usually ignored, this feels like something else entirely. It's still a novel, it's still intended for children and it came out in 1972, so it's classic according to at least one definition of that word, but it tries to be a lot of different things and fails at all of them. Everything about it seems ill-advised.

For a start, it takes the odd position that the best thing about 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' is the lift that moves in every direction. Sure, that was cool in the first book but there were about a thousand things that were cooler. Anyway, that's what we have here and it's no longer the Great Glass Lift; it's the Great Glass Elevator. That's not because it's suddenly American or Roald Dahl is courting that audience, but because it's outside a building. Inside, it's apparently a lift, even if it's moving sideways. Outside, it becomes an elevator. That makes no sense to me.

It certainly elevates, though, because Willy Wonka has to take it to an incredibly high altitude so that it can crash back into his Chocolate Factory at the appropriate velocity. Again, nonsense. But, at a crucial moment, Grandma Josephine panics and grabs Wonka and now they're in orbit. Which is cool. I should mention here that this is a direct sequel to the first book, so Wonka has loaded all four grandparents, and their bed, into the elevator and he's taking them all back to the Chocolate Factory so they can live there and help Charlie run the place. Except now they're in space.

Suddenly this turns into a frustratingly bad satire and I cringed a lot. While the first book is, shall we say, a product of its time, its story and its message stand up today. Hence two adaptations and an entirely new prequel. This book is just plain dated and, while some of that is not its fault, much of it is because it was crass and inappropriate even in 1972. Sure, that's a long time ago but not so much that I wasn't alive.

So, the Great Glass Elevator is now orbiting our planet. Also orbiting our planet is the completely empty Space Hotel U.S.A., which is a stunningly boring name but a good description of what it will be, when the staff arrive. And they're about to, loaded into a Transport Capsule with a TV camera on the front that allows the world to see the Elevator. Now, I don't know precisely what it sees but it would seem to be that it sees an elevator car made entirely of glass that contains a host of odd-looking people and a bed. At least some of those people ought to be highly recognisable because they've been all over the world's news as recently as last week. The whole Golden Ticket thing?

Somehow, however, the President of the United States, Lancelot R. Gilligrass, believes it's a bomb. Now, it's not unfair to see the POTUS as being, well, a little thick, phoning the Soviet Premier and the Chinese Premier on the phone and telling them knock knock jokes. It's not unfair to see the VP as running the country, even if we can accept that it's his nanny, Miss Tibbs. It certainly isn't unfair to see the Chief of the Army as a trigger happy idiot. However, this is a wacky adventure story for kids and hurling us into 'Dr. Strangelove' territory really doesn't fit.

It really doesn't help that the President's hotline to the Chinese Premier gets him to Wing's Fish and Vegetable Store in Shanghai, then Wong, the assistant stationmaster in Chungking, setting up, I kid you not, a Wing and Wong joke. It really doesn't help that the Premier is How-Yu-Bin and his Assistant Premier is Chu-On-Dat. And it emphatically doesn't help that the Chinese characters swap their Rs for their Ls like stereotypical Japanese people are supposed to do. Bizarrely, that's Assistant Plemier Chu-On-Dat but Premier How-Yu-Bin. It doesn't even the common courtesy to be consistent in its poorly targetted racism.

Somehow, I managed to survive long enough to encounter the Vernicious Knids, who are easily the best thing about this book. They're carnivorous shapeshifting aliens who only know a single word of English, which is why they team up to shapeshift into the letters SCRAM before attacking. They haven't attacked us as a species because we have an atmosphere, which apparently Mars, Venus and other planets don't so they wiped them out long ago. Wonka knows this, though we aren't let in on why, and so suckers them into a trap that burns them up in our atmosphere. It's very stupid, but it is at least fun, which is suddenly welcome in this book.

These adventurous shenanigans take us into the second half of the book, which is less frustrating but not as fun. If you'll recall that the first book featured Wonka allowing various obnoxious kids to fall into outrageously awful traps as a means of whittling them down to one that he could feel safe in giving his factory to. Here, there are no kids, outside of Charlie, who already passed that test, so his grandparents get to substitute for them, at least the three not Grandpa Joe, who was happy to finally get out of bed and walk around in the first book.

The other three aren't, so Wonka gives them Wonka-Vite, which magically rejuvenates people. It shouldn't shock you that, while it does exactly what it's supposed to, things go horribly wrong and chaos, as they say, ensues. This near-half of the book isn't bad, but it's uninspired, derivative and, horror of horrors, not as fun as we know it could be. Eventually it ends when the President, who's thankful for our heroes saving the staff of Space Hotel U.S.A from the Vernicious Knids, invites all of them to the White House. And that sets us up for the third book, 'Charlie in the White House', a book that happily doesn't exist except in the form of the first chapter currently on display at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden.

There's a sprawling amount of opportunity for a sequel to 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and it could take any number of forms. Unfortunately, it took this one. SCRAM. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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