A Bounty of Weird Surprises

A Box of Nothing by Peter Dickinson (Delacorte: $14.95, hard-cover; 128 pages)

There’s plenty of everything in “A Box of Nothing,” most of it just plain weird. I read the book twice--not because it was so fascinating but because I was trying to figure out what this weirdness was about and what was holding it all together.

This fantasy for 9- to 12-year-olds starts in ordinary enough fashion when James, an English schoolboy, walks past the borough dump with his mum and the younger kids, from whom he would really like to escape. But events quickly turn unordinary. James tries to hide in the Nothing Shop, a supposedly abandoned store across from the dump, and finds that it isn’t abandoned at all. James “buys” an empty box, a box of nothing, paying nothing for it, from a shopkeeper who then disappears. The box becomes James’ magic talisman.

When Mum pitches the box over the fence into the dump, James finds a hole in the fence and goes after it, embarking on a series of strange adventures in a strange world.

He discovers that the fence around the dump--hereafter capitalized, the Dump--has turned into an iron-gray sea with rust-colored waves, and the trash, like old kitchen cabinets and refrigerators, has “gone fossil”; instead of deteriorating, it has turned into rocks.

Everything seems very large: scavenging gulls as big as airplanes, rats the size of Labrador dogs. He comes upon a lake-like boiling soup that emits a foul gas, and trips over a wire put up by a patrol of rats.

James is rescued by a one-eyed creature that is patched together of odds and ends and who talks in a video-game voice and refers to itself in the plural (“We are the Dump Burra”). The Burra takes him to a place where the food cooks itself, the TV turns itself on and off at will and the bed covers snuggle themselves up around him.

Such domestic tranquillity doesn’t last; there are adventures when the militaristic rats capture and imprison James, when the gulls challenge him to a duel and when he races in a balloon made of plastic bags, fueled by gas collected from foul-smelling Soup Lake and operated by a damaged computer.

James, of course, wants to go home. The Dump is, by turns, interesting and scary, but James misses his scolding mum, his runny-nosed sister, the whining twins--and his attempts to figure out a way to get back to them constitute the main conflict of the story.

“What about the box?” I kept wondering. The mysterious cardboard box that James can’t open has a peculiar effect on things it touches, turning them back into the non-magical, reducing them to normal size. Somehow that box has to figure into getting James home. But not yet.

Not until James, traveling with the Burra and other Dumpish characters, reaches the center of the universe and discovers its secret: that everything started from nothing.

And not until the author has had his fun--with the big-bang theory and with black holes, as well as with the strange adventures. The only possible way out of such an elaborate fantasy seems to be the old “it was only a dream” ending. The author comes close: “Neither was a dream. But the one in the Burra world must have happened in a different kind of time . . . It had all happened to him, James.”

Peter Dickinson clearly had a grand time piling one weirdness on top of another. Young readers who like their fantasies far-out and don’t mind if characters remain flat might have as much fun with “A Box of Nothing” as Dickinson did.