There's a camel on the cover of Too Small to Fail, who goes by the splendid name of Moo. Moo is an Australian camel, in the sense that camels were first introduced to Australia in the 1840s  as beasts of burden for intrepid white explorers  and have lived there ever since. And much of Too Small to Fail is a very Australian tale.
Much of it is universal too, for this wonderfully quirky  all right, downright odd  adventure is about the financial crash. Yes, it actually tackles the likes of credit default swaps ("a type of insurance that investors buy in case their investments go bung") and the matter of "investments turning to poo"  which ain't typical territory for a fun-packed children's read.
The book starts normally enough, with a boy wanting a dog. The boy is Oliver, the dog is Barclay, whom he visits daily, divided only by the glass in the pet shop window. In next to no time, however, things have taken a very different course; he gets the dog only to find himself needing to raise A$11,000.
Oliver's mum and dad are mega-rich and run an Australian investment bank too big to fail. They are too busy to help Oliver, so he decides to sell shares in himself at school, offering to double people's money overnight. But maths never was his strong point, and things soon get out of control. He seeks advice from Hayden, his parents' assistant. "The thing I don't get about investment banking," says Oliver, "is how to stop." Hayden gives him a grin. "That's the whole point," he says. "We never have to  Keep the money moving. That's the secret. Never stop and the big bikkies keep rolling in."
But the cracks are already beginning to show. Oliver encounters Nancy, one of his family's numerous former housekeepers, who invested her savings in the bank and lost them all. She has Moo, a sick camel, to care for in town and plenty more waiting out in the bush on the farmstead. Then there's Rose, who blames Oliver's parents  and Oliver, too  for her father's death.
Oliver is all for giving people their money back, but his dad points out that this would start rumours and, "in the banking business, rumours are like tumours".
As it turns out, of course, the even bigger US banks do fail, taking their bank down with them. Suddenly, Oliver's parents are keeping a low profile. They've lost just about everything  apart from the millions they have stashed away in a Swiss bank account (with security "tighter than a Wiggles concert"). That's the millions Oliver finds out about.
Being a Morris Gleitzman novel, this wonderful tapestry of circumstances is the intricate backdrop against which he weaves the book's most important elements: the characters who people its pages. He is one of the finest examples of a writer who can make humour stem from the things that really matter in life. More than anything, Too Small to Fail is heart-warming and fun.
After his deeply moving Holocaust series, Gleitzman has returned to his own brand of humour with a very real heart.
Philip Ardagh's omnibus edition of The Eddie Dickens Trilogy is published by Faber.