The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy

7:00 pm 24 February 2012
The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy - Terry Pratchett, Jim Burns

'Only You Can Save Mankind': Three Stars

'Johnny and the Dead' :Three Stars

'Johnny and the Bomb': Four Stars

 

Something about Johnny Maxwell never gelled until the third book. His extreme ordinariness and unflappability were played well on top of his parent's prolonged divorce, but he comes off as a bit of a blank. With the exception of key scenes near the climaxes of 'Mankind' and the Tommy Atkins scene in 'The Dead' there wasn't any of those insightful moments that his best work is made up of. Pratchett didn't soften his stance on personal responsibility, hypocrisy, religion, or anything, I just didn't feel it.

The humor was there though, some of it a bit outdated maybe, Each novel actually got better, with Pratchett perhaps figuring out what he could do with such a moral, well-intentioned person pushed into bizarre situations.

Some parts of the humor and references bypassed me because I don't really know what it was like to grow up a British kid in the early to mid 90s. Johnny's 'gang': Would-be hacker Wobbler, asthmatic 'skinhead' Bigmac, terminally uncool Yo-less and the acerbic Kirsty (aka Sigourney, Kimberly, Kassandra and Klytemnestra) are mostly on the outskirts of the action, Johnny being the only person able to see/know what's going on most of the time, but the banter between them ("I reckon...Ronald McDonald is like Jesus Christ.") was perfect, especially in 'Johnny and the Bomb'. Johnny's friends are hauled along to Blitz-era England with him with potentially terrible results. The banter and chatting crossed over into something a bit more revelatory, especially when an oblivious Kirsty tries to soothe Yo-less after he's called a 'Sambo' in 1941.

I'm not sure how much I would have liked these if I'd read them at 12, but they made for a breezy weekend read. Usually I review novels in omnibuses separately, mostly so I have easier access to the reviews about individual books, but these books are pretty short and I just sped right through them and I'm just not feeling three reviews when one would do as well.