Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder: Can Doctor Proctor Save Christmas?

Jo Nesbo's Can Doctor Proctor Save Christmas? is a very silly Norwegian story for 8 year olds about a man who buys Christmas and won't share it.

What happens

It's five days before Christmas Eve and the snow is thick over Oslo, thickest of all over the crooked blue house at the end of Cannon Avenue.

Inside are Lisa from next door, Juliette stirring rice porridge, Doctor Proctor the inventor, who has just improved his time soap so you no longer need a special bathtub, and Nilly.

Nilly is the reason to read this. He's tiny, red-haired, and he cannot carry in an armful of firewood without describing it afterwards as a polar expedition undertaken to save women and children from cold and hunger. Mostly women. He keeps caramel sauce in his pocket for meals he doesn't fancy. At the table he explains about vampire giraffes, whose legs are so long that cars drive underneath them without anybody noticing.

Then the radio interrupts the Christmas requests and all four of them stop dancing mid-turn.

Christmas has been sold. The king did the selling, and the buyer is Mr Thrane, who used to live on Cannon Avenue before he got rich and who now owns the big department store. From now on, if you don't spend ten thousand crowns in his shop, you get no tree, no carols and no Christmas at all.

Underneath the daftness there's a real question in here, and the book asks it out loud. Doctor Proctor points out that fewer and fewer people believe in Santa because he keeps getting lost behind all the buying. Lisa says the thing she wants for Christmas is for life to be a bit better for poor children, and her mother can't quite hear it.

A couple of things to flag. Thrane's twin boys are bullies of the shouting-in-the-street sort, and what they shout at Nilly is about how small he is, and at Lisa about her name. Nobody in the book thinks they're right. And it is a fart powder series, so the humour goes where you'd expect and stays there for a while.

The translation is American, so it's crowns and Mom and Jell-O.

What to read next

If they want to know where Father Christmas came from, A Boy Called Christmas is in the library. Same part of the world, same sort of narrator who talks straight at you, and a boy called Nikolas who sets off north.