DAVID BARNETT follows up his steam-punk novel Gideon Smith And The Mechanical Girl with an even more wildly dizzying tale of adventure, derring-do and fantastical occurrences.

Once again, the hero is young Gideon Smith, a fisherman's son from Sandsend whose earlier glorious shenanigans involved falling in love with Maria, a beautiful mechanical girl, and, thanks to twists too extravagantly wound to mention, becoming the latest Hero Of The Empire.

Barnett creates a comic-book universe in which real Victorian events are smashed to pieces and thrown together again in a mad mosaic. Along the way he has great fun, and so do we, in a steam-powered world that is both old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time.

The journey begins with a mechanically resurrected Charles Darwin with his trousers round his ankles as a dinosaur circles in the sky. From then on the book is a crazy delight, as Gideon and his companions set off in pursuit of Maria, who was kidnapped at the end of the first novel, and fly by airship to America.

What ensues is a sort of Western, in which the bad guys are mechanically enhanced, all blood, oil and mean pistons, and San Francisco is ruled over by the Japanese.

This might sound rather bonkers put like that, but Barnett pulls everything off in great style and with a lively sense of humour. With a final flourish, he also produces a denouement that points to where the next instalment will begin.