As I mentioned in my review of Angus MacVicar's 'The Atom Chasers', a one session chunk of kid's adventure set in Scotland, I felt like I should dive right into its sequel, 'The Atom Chasers in Tibet', which, of course, is set a long way away, at least once we get moving. We do start in Scotland but we don't stay there for long and much of this book is spent with the Atom Chasers adventuring in Tibet on a quest for a mysterious book.

The reason for that arrives on the second page in the form of Kit Kennedy, a young American who works for the Atlax Publishing Corporation in Chicago. The international papers have been talking about a trader, recovering from malaria in Delhi, after a trip into eastern Tibet where he found a hidden monastery in the mountains near Chagpori, where a lama let him on the secret that they held a mysterious "cure for all ills", 'The Book of Wisdom', supposedly brought to them centuries earlier by a pilgrim travelling from the west. Atlax want to publish it, hence the trip.

Kennedy has come to see Major Morrison, the laird of Dunglass, due to the recommendation of a character we met in the first book, Sir Wilfred Steele, who runs the local atomic station but wrote a few books for Atlax in his spare time. Hearing that Kennedy was planning to fly to Tibet in quest of this book, he pointed out that the Major had led a military expedition into that country in 1928 and got a CBE for his work. He knows the country well and the people there like him, so it makes a lot of sense for Kennedy to seek him out and ask him to tag along.

Of course, the Major is the fourth member of the Atom Chasers, the other three of which are also there when Kennedy arrives, so hear the news. Those three were the leads of the first book; but, I have to say, have a lot less reason to play a major part in this one. Sure, MacVicar avoids the trap a majority of rural British series fall into, whatever their genre, by suggesting that nothing of note has happened in Dunglass in the year since the previous volume and whisking them off to Tibet to find an adventure worthy of a sequel. However, there really isn't a good reason for the boys to be in this one. While they certainly play their parts in the adventure to come, this isn't a book about them so much as it is a book that they happen to be in a lot.

Just to refresh as to who these previous leads and new supporting characters are, they're Sandy Campbell, son of the local minister; Jock Galbraith, son of the local postmaster; and Willie Niven, son of a local farmer, who's still notably short for his age, even though they're all a year older in this one. That means that Sandy and Jack are now fourteen and Willie twelve, so the Major has a job on his hands to persuade both Kennedy and the boys' parents to let them tag along. He does and so they do and before long they crash in Tibet.

Unlike the 'Three Investigators' book I reviewed this month, where the leads wrap one chapter in Rocky Beach, California but have already arrived in Varania on another continent by the time the next begins, MacVicar maps out their journey. They take a taxi to Inverness and a train to London, then fly in Kit's plane to Lhasa, via Rome, Beirut, Basra, Karachi and Delhi. I could picture readers back in 1957 following that journey on their father's globes. I did the same in 2024. And, yes, I said "crash" because they fly through a storm on the last leg of their journey, which damages one wing and forces them to land. The plane needs repairs before it can fly again, but they're safe and they have arrived in Tibet.

So to the adventure, which unfolds in episodic fashion, with aid from a whole bunch of characters who can speak English, though this is acknowledged through history rather than glossed over, in the way that every alien being in 'Star Trek' just happens to share the same language. The first is Thangme, a spry seventy-year-old they meet as they journey on foot to the nearest town, and he's the one who takes them over a dring druka, or bamboo rope bridge, a great opportunity for the next showcase moment, in this instance Willie getting stuck halfway because fear takes over. He was always fearful in the first book, but did the job anyway. He's a little more annoying here.

Then they reach Kyirong, the City of Joy, where Viceroy Sharong, educated in Britain, welcomes a bunch of strangers and introduces them to his daughter, Princess Chenla. In another book, that's enough to set a romance into motion. Fortunately, MacVicar exercises restraint on that front. On they go towards Chagpori and the Iron Mountain, only to be captured by Lobsang and his bevy of bandits. What's wonderful here is not that they're treated well, but that Lobsang is very much a sporting chap in the British tradition who has found a sort of balance with the viceroy. And so the future of their expedition depends on a challenge Lobsang sets and honours.

I'm sure you won't be shocked to discover that one of these episodes involves the most famous of the denizens of Tibet, namely abominable snowmen, but MacVicar has his own explanation there that doesn't dip into the supernatural. And, eventually, of course, they make it to the monastery, where the lama lets them see the Book of Wisdom and it's part of exactly what we thought it was from the very beginning. That could have spoiled another book by another author, but this one is truly about the journey far more than it's about the destination, so I wasn't disappointed at all.

If anything, I was a little disappointed by the fact that this is a pure adventure novel without too much mystery. Its predecessor was a more involved adventure novel about spies seeking atomic secrets, where we were tasked with unmasking the villain or villains before the Atom Chasers. In this book, we have nothing to do but tag along for the ride, as indeed those titular characters do. It's fun and I enjoyed a glimpse into a country that's still rather exotic today, at a crucial point in time. Clearly Tibet had been affected by the British historically, though we never colonised it, but the Chinese arrived in 1950 and the nation changed in ways that the locals didn't appreciate.

While MacVicar's primary science fiction series, the 'Lost Planet' books, ran to eight volumes, it's easy to see why this one only got to two. There wasn't a real need to keep the Atom Chasers going into a second book, as enjoyable as it was, and there certainly wasn't a need to write a third. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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