All the classic children's genre novels I've reviewed thus far from the United States are ones that I've heard of before, even if I hadn't previously read most of them. This, however, is one that I only found through research because I'd never heard of it. It was published by Viking in 1947 and it won the Newbury Medal the following year, putting it in the company of later winners like A Wrinkle in Time and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

Pène du Bois was an American writer, born in New Jersey, but, as his name suggests, his heritage is French and his family moved to Paris when he was eight, so he was educated in France and grew up there, later serving in the French army and co-founding 'The Paris Review'. Even though he wasn't born until 1916, eleven years after the death of Jules Verne, it's perhaps unsurprising that this be so obviously influenced by the famed author of 'Around the World in Eighty Days' and 'Five Weeks in a Balloon'.

The former is mentioned in the text because Prof. William Waterman Sherman does the same job in a mere forty days, however unintentionally. The latter is a more obvious inspiration, given that he sets out from San Francisco in 1883 with the firm intention of spending a full year in his balloon. After all, he had no intention of travelling fast or far. He only wanted to be alone, having spent the previous forty years teaching arithmetic to children. He wanted peace and quiet, freedom from a routine that had imprisoned him for so long, and so designed a giant balloon that would serve as his home for a full year.

Of course, it doesn't work out that way, because this is an adventure novel in the Verne tradition, even if it also taps into historical fiction and utopian science fiction. Where it comes alive is in the application of both science and whimsy to invention. Sherman's endearing stubbornness feels like something from Verne too, because the opening chapters set up a mystery that he firmly refuses to explain except to the Western American Explorers' Club in San Francisco. He set out to fly west from there across the Pacific, but he's picked up three weeks later amongst the debris of twenty deflated balloons. In the Atlantic. He throws out the Mayor of New York and refuses the President of the United States. He'll only tell his story to the Western American Explorers' Club.

And so he does. Now, there are clues there, if you know your history and geography. He sets out in 1883 to travel west from San Francisco across the Pacific and everything's peaceful until an incident with a seagull causes him to crash on a small volcanic island. If you haven't worked out which from those clues, I'll let you in on the detail that hangs over this book like the Sword of Damocles. He's stranded on Krakatoa right before its volcano erupts, causing some of the largest explosions ever experienced during man's existence. The third explosion on 27th August, which was heard as far as three thousand miles away, has been described as the loudest sound in history. The pressure wave circumnavigated the globe three and a half times.

What that means is that we readers know full well, whether we're reading an original release in 1947 or in serious catch-up mode in 2025, that the professor isn't going to spending a lot of time on Krakatoa. It also means that we know how he ends up in the Atlantic, just that he has to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from the propulsion driven by the natural explosive power of a volcano this violent. And we're right, but that still leaves plenty of time for him to experience the magic of this story.

And that's because Krakatoa, contrary to the expectations of the world, is populated. It's not very populated, only by twenty families of four people each that are regimented in very specific ways. None of them are native. One of them found an incredibly rich diamond mine there, so rich that it could crash the world's economy. Rather than do that, he went back home to not only bring his own wife and two children, but nineteen other equivalents chosen very deliberately to fit into his own vision of a utopia. It's a bizarre setup, driven as much by sheer imagination and invention as by a strange willingness to become anonymous.

Each family is given a letter of the alphabet which becomes their only identity. For instance, Mr. & Mrs. A have two children, A-1 and A-2. Through the Gourmet Government system, they operate an American restaurant that serves American food every twentieth day, prepared by them for every other family on the island on what's known as "A" Day. Then they enjoy everyone else's cooking for nineteen days before it's their turn again, starting with Mr. & Mrs. B's British chop house, helped, of course, by their children B-1 and B-2, who provide the food on "B" Day. And so on.

This is a really bizarre utopian setup. It feels fundamentally communist, all eighty people ditching their identities to conform to a set structure that governs their lives, each of them providing for each other. However, it's also ruthlessly capitalist, because it's funded by carefully releasing new diamonds to the world economy at a rate that doesn't depress the market. They use the proceeds to buy whatever they want and ship it back, ever so carefully so that neighbours remain unaware of their presence, to enrich their lives on Krakatoa, feeding their creative instincts, building and customising their houses and inventing all sorts of wild and wonderful gadgets.

As with any utopian science fiction, it's easy to find fault with the vision. Here, greed doesn't exist because everyone on the island is ridiculously rich. By conventional standards, they're literally the richest eighty people on the planet. When you have everything, what more can you possibly want? That seems fair enough but the catch, which isn't remotely explored here, is that wealth isn't only material. Nobody here lusts for power or fame or worship, all of which they could easily have with a simple betrayal of their community. Take enough diamonds, go somewhere else and set yourself up as a god. It wouldn't be difficult. Does Pène du Bois cover that possibility by having the initial discoverer of the diamond mine select these families carefully? That seems like a stretch.

Of course, this is a children's book, written in delightfully accessible prose. I absolutely adore the ease by which Pène du Bois explains the minutiae of life on Krakotoa in such accessible language. We might expect that discussing calendar structure, logistical requirements and the structure of government might be, well, boring, but it never is. It's as quirky and imaginative as any encounter with, say, the Balloon Merry-Go-Round, which is joyously expressed as it is wildly inappropriate for a community trying to hide from its neighbours.

Joy and delight are common themes here, the mindset of the book clearly being to get out there and enjoy life. It's an adventure long before it's a comedy, but there are moments of humour that shine. My favourite such features the city of San Francisco rolling out the welcome mat to Sherman as he gets closer to recounting his story at the Western American Explorers' Club. They play into a balloon theme, as you might expect, but without a particularly good understanding of what they do and how they work. While I'm in two minds about whether a cinematic adaptation of the story would do it justice, I would absolutely love to see the first few chapters on film, as well-intentioned acts go hilariously wrong.

If there's another common theme, it's one that comes from joy and delight and that's invention. I perhaps should have expected this, given the Jules Verne influence that was obvious before I even opened the book, but Pène du Bois invents the transporter from Star Trek during his introduction. How's that for getting off on the right foot?

My favourite invention, though, has to be the idea of continuous sheets, as implemented in Mr. & Mrs. M's Moroccan house. There's a crank on the bed that allows them to be turned just enough to ensure that they're fresh every day, while the substantial mechanisms below clean the used parts in a continual cycle. I like this as much for its complicated unfeasibility as for the fact that Pène du Bois revisited the idea in 'Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead', a 1966 book with the opposite intent: it's a morality tale about a boy who lives in an electric house that goes wrong. He looks to have had an interesting career, even if this is easily his best known book and I still hadn't heard of it. I'm happy that I have now. ~~ Hal C F Astell