Trolls on Mars: A Love Story

When I first read Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, I soon realized that one invention (conceit, in the old parlance) made the book: the daemons. It not only simplified characterization drastically by providing a visible symbol of the essence of each character, but created a distance between characters and themselves.  By masterfully exploiting the interactions between the characters and their daemons, Pullman brings to light inner conflicts of which the young characters themselves remain largely unconscious.  Something similar is going on in Trolls on Mars: A Love Story, only solely within the protagonist, Barnaby Bone Crusher the Treed, a. k. a. Nancy Flora. Rather than having a daemon, however, the troll is blessed (cursed?) by having a composite being, the result of a struggle between identical twins in the womb from which emerged a dominant (Nancy) and subordinate (Flora) self. Poor Flora has only a tiny extraneous foot and eye to his name. The eye, however, can see two minutes into the future because had Flora managed to get born (which he didn’t), he would have been born two minutes before Nancy. Much of the humour of the work thus takes place within the confines of Barnaby’s lumpy skull, as his two selves continue to duke it out. 

Add to this the trolls’ odd numeracy system (and, yes, he is Barnaby the Treed) along with their speech and one has a potent recipe for laughs.

The book also tackles the hilarious hazards besetting troll matrimony, obviously a pressing social issue.  If readers can learn something about the romantic struggles of humans in the process, so much the better.  Full disclosure: the author is about as close to me as another person can be.