The Alchemist's Portrait
by Simon Rose

It has been over 100 years since Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee stumbled into King Arthur's court, but the time-travel adventure genre remains alive and well and is increasingly a staple of children's literature. Calgary writer Simon Rose embraces the form in The Alchemist's Portrait, a novel for young readers (aged 11 to 13). The book pits an archvillain from 17th century Holland, an alchemist and artist intent on taking over the world, against Matthew, a schoolboy from today.

Matthew finds himself drawn into a painting while on a class tour of a museum - literally pulled into the work itself by its subject, a young man named Peter Glimmer. The portrait, credited to Nicolaas van der Layden, is dubbed The Gloomy Cavalier, and upon meeting Peter, Matthew discovers that the young man has good reason to appear downcast: Peter's father was murdered by his evil brother. The young man's own death has been averted only by the charmed frame of the painting.

On subsequent visits to the museum, Matthew plunges again and then again into the canvas. He travels back and forth from the past to the present, enlisted to help look for a book of spells that can free Peter and allow him to seek vengeance on his uncle. Matthew's sister, Sally, and his best friend, Alex, are also drawn into the action along with a young woman who works in the restoration room of the museum. The alchemist, who has defied time, is in fact her boss. A damaged portrait of him, once the restoration is complete, will bring back terrible, dark powers.

Rose's story is more obviously aligned with the fantasy of J.K. Rowling than with gentle time-travel tales such as Tom's Midnight Garden and the Green Knowe series, in which a growing knowledge of the past enriches the lives of contemporary characters. Rose would do well, though, to examine the Harry Potter books to see how Rowling establishes setting, orchestrates incidents and builds character with detail. All of these aspects are rather sparse in The Alchemist's Portrait.

A good deal of the text is devoted to explanations of how the complicated magic operates. There's the painting frame, which freezes and protects Peter but also serves as a portal for shifting scenes throughout the years back to 1666. Glimpses of scenes of chaos from the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the American Civil War unfold like a video caught on fast forward. Then there's the magic paint that gives eternal life to the subject of a portrait, and the logistics of people being hurled in and out of paintings. Add to this the spells from a book of black magic and a particularly potent magic that allows van der Leyden to fling bolts of fire at anyone trying to stop him from his dastardly goal of world domination.

Maybe Rose is simply trying to do too much in one slim volume. There's enough material here for a fat trilogy if he would slow down and go for some full-scale construction. Perhaps his second time-travel novel, The Sorcerer's Letterbox (launched May 8), about a youth from today attempting to rescue the boy king Edward V from imprisonment in the tower, will find a focus and form that convinces readers they've actually lived and breathed in a historical time and place. -- Alberta Views by Glen Huser

It seemed like an ordinary field trip. Matthew's class was going to the museum. However, the predictability ended at the door of the museum. Once inside, Matthew stopped to look at a seventeenth century Dutch masterpiece. Suddenly he realized that the boy in the picture was not a part of the painting but rather a real boy who had been frozen in his own portrait. The villain, Nicolaas van der Leyden had trapped Peter inside his own painting. So begins Matthew's quest to free Peter. His journey takes him back in time to the seventeenth century where he sets out to free Peter and consequently the entire world from the evil grasp of the villain.

As with all fantasies, Simon Rose has made good use of a magic portal through which Matthew passes into a strange and ancient world which is meticulously detailed by Rose's descriptive eloquence. The forces of good embodied by Matthew, innocence personified by Peter and evil in the body of Nicolaas van der Leyden are larger than life. The people who populate this fantasy land form an interesting society.

The Alchemist's Portrait is guaranteed to keep junior grade readers in suspense. Its fast-paced plot will keep them reading to the end. This is a good acquisition for any library or private collection and might well augment a classroom reading program. Those who study Fantasy as a literary genre might well add The Alchemist's Portrait to their teaching repertoire.

Thematic Links: Art; Museums; Field Trips; Time Travel; History; Friendship; Adventure; Fantasy -Gail Lennon