What to do with a Heliopolis prince with his head stuck in the clouds

David Cunningham

Faber & Faber, 6.99

THIS bold and original children's fantasy novel opens in Heliopolis, an entire civilisation perched above interminable clouds on top of a peak.

Life in the citadel is rigorously stratified along feudal lines, to the extent that the young Prince Marcus, sequestered at the highest level, has never seen the farmer's layer, or the bureaucracy, or the artisans' quarters. Their society is technologically advanced, and vast dirigibles called aro:cruisers carry diplomatic missions to other citadels; yet a core of unscientific superstition still persists. No one, for example, knows what lies beneath the cloud layer: an abyss, the domain of their god Omnium, or something else entirely?

Heliopolis maintains a tentative peace with its neighbours after the devastating Hemispheric Wars: a peace that is threatened when Marcus's father fails to return from a state visit. That threat, however, may not be a rival citadel, but a traitor in Heliopolis itself.

Marcus, both nave and determined, demands that a rescue operation is launched, which gives an unlikely opponent the opportunity to scupper the royal aro:cruiser, sending it plummeting to whatever exists beneath the clouds.

Cunningham has cleverly imported into a tale for young teenagers some of the elements more usually associated with fantasy writing for an older audience. Heliopolis, for example, bears some resemblance to the arcane, inhibiting palace in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, and Marcus, like Peake's Titus Groan, chafes against the strict regulations and feels worryingly isolated from the people whom he will one day govern.

The world is richly imagined and is recognisable as "steam-punk", a sub-genre of speculative fiction where the setting may be anachronistic, but certain alternative mechanical inventions have developed within the period's limitations. The nephologists and ornithopters of Cunningham's universe put Cloud World in the same broad tradition as China Miville's New Crobuzon Trilogy, and Michael Moorcock's A Nomad of the Timestreams.

In the aftermath of the attack, Marcus and the stranded survivors have a wholly new set of challenges, not the least of which is the radical alteration of their world-view. Having lived in the permanent sunshine and thin air of the citadel, they are plunged into a cloud-covered, frozen landscape, torn by territorial disputes and haunted by myths of the gods above the clouds. Cunningham has a lot of fun with this shift of perspective and overturning of presumptions, and their adventures in the world beneath are as gripping and fast-paced as the action above the clouds, including a memorable icicle fight.

Marcus has to grow up fast, not just in terms of fending for himself and earning the respect of his comrades, but in thinking about whether or not the hierarchical world of Heliopolis is really the best organisation of society.

This is a well-written, engaging and imaginative novel, much of whose plot is left unresolved on a final cliff-hanger. It seems a growing trend within children's books - Zizou Corder's Lion Boy being another example - to abandon the reader, in the hope that a combination of pester-power and frustration will guarantee sales of Volume II. Cunningham's work is strong enough not to require such manipulations. That said, I do want to know what happens next.