BOOK REVIEW: A Writer's Opinion

 Eoin Colfer

I have read and thoroughly enjoyed all Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl novels since I bought the first one in WHSmiths on Orpington High Street in the 1990s, though I’m told the recent film adaptation was less than successful. As a writer of action-adventure tales for young teenage readers and young adults, I think he deserves his superstar writer status. The Artemis Fowl series are amusing, exciting, ingenious and have interesting characterisation. It is significant, however, that a friend’s teenage son to whom I lent one of the novels didn’t enjoy it because he found all the ‘technical details’ boring. Personally, I enjoyed the ‘technical details’ and they enriched the stories for me, but I can see what this young reader meant.

               Colfer has a distinctive style, full of flamboyant similes and metaphors, jokey and lively, with lots of direct address to the reader. Reading the Artemis Fowl books is like being told a complex story by a particularly articulate and witty Irish uncle. I felt that his foray into writing a new addition to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy series was less of a success, however, as he didn’t really capture the ineffable sparkle of comic and fantasy genius of Adams himself. Nevertheless, I have read one or two other Colfer novels over the years and found them generally entertaining.

 

           


This year, during a lull in my reading, I decided to take another dip into the Colfer bookverse. Firstly, I read the first two of his new Fowl series, this time based on Artemis’s younger twin brothers, Beckett and Myles. These were acceptably lively novels for the younger teenage market, capturing some of the verve and humour of the Artemis Fowl novels but suffering from the lack of Artemis, Butler, Holly, Mulch, Foaly and, of course, Artemis himself. I wasn’t as enthusiastic as some of the many positive reviews of the series I’ve read, though I enjkoyed the contrasting personalities of Myles and Beckett, and I particularly enjoyed Book One. They weren’t as good as the original series however and I doubt I will read the third in the new series when it comes out.

RATING: The Fowl Twins & The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges ***

Having revived my Colfer appetite and still not ready to face anything more challenging, I took a look at the trilogy for older readers based on WARP (the FBI’s Witness Anonymous Relocation Programme). This is a time-travel story, featuring twentieth-century teenage FBI consultant, Native-American Chevron Savano, and nineteenth-century London teenage stage magician, Riley. I am often drawn to time-travel stories, but equally as often find them ultimately a little irritating. Colfer gets round the time paradoxes by inventing a ‘wormhole’ which turns out to be sentient and which interacts with those who go into it in a way that, frankly, I found confusing and mystifying. It might be that I wasn’t reading closely enough, but I increasingly found myself failing to follow the ‘logic’ of this wormhole, though that certainly didn’t make the stories unreadable.

      


These three novels have some definite strengths. One strength is Colfer’s creation of a superbly hideous villain, Albert Garrick, who seems simultaneously utterly plausible and preternaturally terrifying.  Garrick features prominently in books one and three, but is replaced in book two by another villain, Colonel Box, a psychopath with a military background who uses the wormhole in an attempt to create a world-wide Boxite religious dictatorship in the twenty-first century, providing an opportunity for Colfer to comment on such bullying and stifling tyrannies. Colfer gives the books international appeal by having US and British characters, and there are a number of vividly-drawn secondary characters who help keep the narrative alive. My particular favourite was the leader of the criminal guys, the Rams, who first appears in Book One and becomes a bigger character in Book Two.

               I have to say, however, that although the books were clever, action-packed, with amusing and convincing dialogue, plot twists right, left and centre, likeable heroes, and a magnificent array of appealing minor characters, I became ultimately rather bored by the seemingly non-stop action-sequences. I felt some were stretched out far beyond the point where my mind was wandering, particularly in the third book. In fact, I thought the novels would be substantially improved by being reduced in length by about a quarter. They did have the remarkable magic of Colfer’s imagination and creativity, but I grew bored with what began to feel slightly repetitive conversations and slightly over-described action scenes. I felt they could have been tightened up a bit more. However, presumably readers who are fans of Colfer’s style appreciate the length and complexity of these stories. And it is always nice to have a feisty if slightly implausible heroine.

RATING: The WARP trilogy: The Reluctant Assassin, The Hangman’s Revolution, The Forever Man ***

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way