The Broken Stone and the Secret of the Heavens' Henge
by Jonathan Morris
Handow
Jonathan Morris is a British engineer who worked on the Chek Lap Kok airport and the Tseung Kwan O MTR line. He's also an award-winning technical author, but his first foray into fiction, The Broken Stone and the Secret of the Heavens' Henge, seems a stop too far, because it fails to mind the gap between a children's book and a treatise on a pet scientific theory.
The Broken Stone is set in Neolithic times, and Morris paints a vivid, well-researched impression of family life in ancient villages. The local elders send two pre-teens, Clende and his younger sister, Marce, to attend a great tribal gathering and collect an inheritance with their old, Merlin-like teacher, Sanoc.
Morris describes their quest in a simple plot, but readers might wonder whether he is taking the trio into the mists of Neolithic Europe, or yet another Lord of the Rings-like scenario. And with characters' names such as Vivienne, Tashe, Toby, Ehrahat, Firelark and Ravenor, you might be forgiven for expecting a hobbit to spring out of the bushes at any moment.
The Broken Stone wears thin when Morris introduces his young audience to the science of solar mechanics, initially with brief descriptions of structures with wooden posts, mirrors, mounds, stone blocks and ditches.
Helpful elders then weave into the story detailed explanations of how these devices were built to follow the sun, plot the movement of the heavens around them, and record the seasons in spherical temples such as Stonehenge.