Up on Cloud Nine by Anne Fine

Anne Fine's's best-known teenage novels have always had a grown-up following – particularly when translated to the screen, with the wonderful Madame Doubtfire becoming a hit film and Goggle-Eyes successfully televised for evening viewing. Her latest book for older children might prove less pleasing to an all-age market. For while Up on Cloud Nine is witty and compelling, the message it carries to adult readers does not make for comfortable reading. Here is a picture of modern childhood tragic at its centre, however frequently comic on the outside.

Its main character Stol, short for Stuart Terence Oliver, is encountered in a comatose state on a hospital trolley, having broken a number of bones. He is attended throughout by his best friend Ian, the adopted son of an affectionate, sparky husband and wife. Stol himself possesses natural parents, both successful in their fields but time-poor for their only child to the point of penury.

But Stol does not fall out of a top window – or did he jump? – simply because he is neglected by his super-egotistical parents. He is more a junior version of Dostoyevsky's Idiot, too open and truthful for the world he lives in. Not that Stol is persecuted at home, where he spends nearly all his time with Ian's family, nor at school, where teachers and pupils regularly fall under his spell.

His problems are with himself, and the dark fantasies that constantly crop up in the macabre stories he keeps on inventing for himself and everyone else. At times, he is so taken up by this inner world that the real one outside comes to seem second-rate. This leaves him dangerously detached from others while also coming over as recklessly critical of all he sees and hears around him.

Children blurting out uncomfortable home truths have always been part of the stuff of humour, as anyone who has ever laughed themselves silly over Richmal Crompton's William would surely agree. But adolescents who continue with this habit are not usually so popular, particularly in teenage masculine culture, where looking "cool" often seems more important than having anything interesting to say.

As Stol puts it: "Now we live by the invisible Scorecard. Nobody talks about it, but it's there all right. Who's smart. Who looks good. Who is good at games. Who gets invited to things. Who's never teased or bullied. It just gets tougher and tougher, and you can't talk about it, not to anyone." He himself has the words to express such feelings, themselves as old as adolescence itself. But he finds it difficult to talk about them to other contemporaries, all too ready to retreat into inarticulacy.

This sounds like a depressing scenario, but as befits an author who has now taken over from Quentin Blake as children's laureate, Fine is not one to leave her young readers stripped of hope. While her adult novels can be savage to the point of desperation, her stories for children – with the exception of The Tulip Touch – always end on a note of reconciliation, however exhaustingly hard-won. Once out of his coma, Stol is forced to agree that if another of his previous near-departures from life had been successful, this would have deprived both him and those he is closest to of much shared enjoyment.

His ghastly parents are also shaken by this latest episode, although their part in the hastily devised plot to conceal the extent of Stol's despair from some suspicious social workers is the only false note in this otherwise brave and sometimes brilliant book.

And as always with Anne Fine, the jokes are excellent. However hard-pressed her teacher and parent characters may be, they still have time for the type of black humour that can light up an otherwise dull day.

The reviewer is author of the new Rough Guides to children's books, for 0-5 and 5-11 years (distributed by Penguin)

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