Sometimes a book comes along that is so uneexpectedly wonderful and clever you can only give thanks and enjoy it. Reif Larsen’s debut novel is one such book – a beautifully written coming-of-age novel that is immeasurably enhanced by the copious marginalia of T.S. Spivet, the twelve year old genius mapmaker of the title. To describe T.S. Spivet (and by extension Larsen, who did almost all of the drawings himself) as a mapmaker does not really do justice to the range of illustrations, sketches, diagrams and other ephemera that decorates the specially extended margins, often accompanied by extensive notes. In any other work, these digressions would probably be mere footnotes, but this style of presentation is so much more engaging, and it makes The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet an object of wonder before you have even settled down to start reading, enhanced by the fact that the hardback edition is itself a thing of beauty, with the wonderful contrast between the faux-exercise-book styling and the gold embossed lettering on this outsized volume.

But none of this would add up to a hill of beans without a good story – and it really is a good story. T.S. Spivet is a twelve  year old genius (I debated with myself for a while whether he was autistic, in a Curious Incident sort of a way, but came to the conclusion that he is a) really a genius, and b) only twelve, and I should stop trying to ascribe medical conditions to him!). He lives on a ranch in Montana, with his abstracted, scientist mother and his father, a terse son-of-the-soil who seems to model himself on John Wayne. He has a sister, who as a teenager is hard for him to understand (but not for him to describe, especially his wonderful description of her “conniption fits”), and he had a brother, Layton, who was everything T.S. was not, but who died in a firearms accident. Layton’s presence is never far from T.S.’s thoughts, and he makes sense of his world by drawing maps – geological, astronomical, demographic, you name it, it’s all there in a series of exactly organised, colour-coded exercise books, lining the room (naturally, we get to see a map) of this extraordinary boy.

When the Smithsonian Musuem, to whom T.S. has supplied a number of amazing drawings, phone up and ask him to accept an important prize, they are completely unaware he is only twelve. After some soulsearching, T.S. decides to set out to Washington to accept the award – but without telling his parents, all he can think to do is ride the rails, hobo style. His journey, lugging a huge case containing items he regards as essential (including the skeleton of a sparrow and a number of mathematical instruments), takes him via Chicago to the nation’s capital, and brings him in to contact with all manner of strange and unpleasant people. While en route he learns a lot about his mother and her family history by reading a journal of hers (extracts are reproduced at length). On arrival, the scientific establishment quickly overcome their shock at his age to embrace the opportunity he represents to attract national interest to science – and it take an unlikely alliance of a secret society and members of his family to prevent him from being exploited.

As a narrator, T.S. Spivet is a great joy – Larsen captures the intelligence of a true boy genius, and the bewilderment any twelve-year old can feel about the world, in pitch-perfect combination. T.S.’s brains never alienate us from him, because they are counterbalanced by his baffled love for his home and family, and by the way he uses his skills to analyse and present some of the ludicrousness of modern life in such an engaging way. Although there was one scientifically implausible plot element that I found rather unnecessary, that should not detract from the fact that this is a wonderful book, elevated to even stronger levels of enjoyability by its drawings, maps and sidenotes – a labour of love, beautifully realised.

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