Danny Piper and the lessons from history

　
I’m reading an amazing book at the moment which you won’t find in any bookshop. Not yet anyway. It’s written by my Bulawayo host and good friend Ian Pugh (real name) and while you could accuse me of being biased, you would be very wrong.

The book is called ‘Wolfstorm’ and follows the adventures of twelve year old Danny Piper and friends as they travel through time. Ian, who has self-published the book, after receiving a bunch of standard rejection letters from UK publishers, asked me to read it and give my opinion. To be honest, I initially thought being a children’s book, that this my prove a bit of a chore but once past for the first chapter, I was hooked.

Danny Piper takes me back to when I first started reading books which was probably about eleven or twelve. ‘Biggles’ was one of my early heroes. A fictional pilot and adventurer, created by W.E. Johns in 1932, he was whipping the Nazis long before Indiana Jones put on a Fedora. (Incidentally, the first ever Biggles story was called ‘The White Fokker’ which is a WW1 plane by the way!)

Biggles was a wholesome ‘Tallyho’ character, who stood for essentially British values of bravery, honesty and fair play and while he smoked and drank alcohol (the books were aimed at adolescents), there was little ‘hanky panky’ with the opposite sex. Biggles it seemed preferred singledom and the company of his mates Algy and Ginger rather than settling down. But it’s the titles of the books in which are most memorable. Some of my favourites are ‘Biggles gets it rough’, ‘Biggles cuts it fine’ and most excitingly ‘Biggles does some homework’. (Monty Python did a ‘Biggles’ sketch once called ‘Biggles combs his hair’.)

Where Danny Piper’s story is similar to Biggles is in the attention to historical detail and actual real events. (Danny at one point, ends up at the Nuremburg Rally, dressed reluctantly as a flag-bearing Hitler Youth before making his escape!) Ian skilfully weaves historical fact into Danny’s time travel adventures, resulting an ultimately entertaining and educational read, which positively encourages a hunger for history.

But it’s his grey, technological vision of a future world of extinct animals and depleted vegetation, which probably teaches the most valuable lesson - that unless we start caring about the environment in the present, the outlook is a bleak one.

This is a wholesome book, that will appeal to both parents and children for different reasons, all of them enjoyable. Move over Harry Potter, here comes Danny Piper!

If you are interested in buying Ian’s book, you can email him on ian@blueappledesign.co.zw or if you living in South Africa, it will soon be available at Exclusive Books.