The four children who make up ["the unit" in Dustland], Thomas, Levi, Justice and Dorian, and who in their encounter with "the future" sometimes lose "psychic chunks", are so scantily drawn as to evade the imagination. However assiduously we follow up clues and try to interpret allegories (even with recourse to The New Testament, Tolkien, or Psychic News), without a picture of the children, only available in Dustland's precursor, Justice and her Brothers or towards the end of Dustland itself, we risk bewilderment and boredom. This is a great pity for if the two books had been combined the Dustland episode would have been absorbed into an intriguing whole.

In the earlier book we gradually become aware of the extrasensory powers of a family of three American, small-town, lower middle class children and their friend Dorian. The unlikelihood of ESP, which is skilfully inserted into the main...