Book review: ‘The Murdstone Trilogy’ by Mal Peet

I tend to read almost no fiction. But, when I do read fiction, The Murdstone Trilogy by the late Mal Peet is very much the type of fiction I don’t tend to read.

The friend who bought it for me described it as ‘funny, daft and a bit scary’. I did indeed find it funny in places, and it’s certainly daft. I didn’t find it particularly scary.

The Murdstone Trilogy is the story of a diminishingly successful author of ’young adult’ fiction, Philip Murdstone, whose sexy agent encourages him to write more popular stuff, namely ‘High Fantasy. Sometimes spelled Phantasy, with a pee-aitch.’ Murdstone hates everything to do with the genre. So, by the sound of it did Mal Peet.

Next thing he knows, Murdstone is banging out volume one of his trilogy, as if chanelling something from another dimension: the dimension, indeed, of his trilogy. Someone, or something, seems to be doing the writing for him.

The rest, as they say, is pure phantasy (with a pee-aitch).

But enough of my yakking, here’s what Mal Peet had to say about his book: