Artemis Fowl

Artemis Fowl is one of the more popular children’s fantasies around at the moment, but it’s also one of the poorer ones. I first read it at the same time as The Wind Singer, and forgot just as much of it, though the one thing that I remembered was the little encoded story about a prophet who sees the future encoded in phlegm. I was keen on codes at that stage in my life, even daft ones where fairy language just happens to have a symbol for every English letter, and found the phlegm-reader’s story quite entertaining; I wrote it out in purple ink, but unfortunately on Friday I dropped it in the bath. Sorry, lil’ me! Unfortunately, it’s only a tiny aside, an ‘Easter egg’ in internet parlance. The main story has less to commend it.

There are two sorts of children’s book in the world: cute and cool. Roald Dahl is ‘cute’. So is Lemony Snicket. They’re not realistic, and don’t pretend to be. They’re silly, and exaggerated, and tell a fun story, with great scope for humour. On the ‘cool’ side, you have books like His Dark Materials and The Lord of the Rings. They take themselves more seriously, and though they can have humour in them, there’s more coherence and they tend to have more emotional impact. I prefer the latter category, but there is plenty of good stuff in the former. And some series manage to cross over. Harry Potter, for example, starts cute, and has now made the transition into cool – although one of the problems I have with the series is how the hangovers from the ‘cute’ stages are something of an albatross now.

Artemis Fowl is written ‘cute’, but badly wants to be ‘cool’. This is its problem: it’s forever doing two things at once, and doing neither of them well. Artemis is supposed to be a criminal genius, but he’s really just a normal boy who loves his mum. This could work well, if not for the fact that we never believe he’s a master criminal. The writer, Eoin Colfer, has to keep telling us that he’s a genius, telling us that he’s scary, and is forever making him do something like laugh or joke, then saying ‘Oh, but that was very out of character’, not only for him, but for Commander Short, for Foaly, for Butler…we are told so much that a character is doing something that they don’t usually that it’s hard not to think Colfer is just trying to shoehorn characters into shapes that he doesn’t really want to write. The premise is cool: criminal mastermind kid takes on the fairies, who secretly have lots of big guns. In execution, we get badly-thought-out ideas about magic, endless corny jokes that even Terry Pratchett would be above (mostly following the format ‘oh I’m going to say a dirty word like a- ’ ‘Woah, there!’) and poo jokes, a jokey style that you can’t take seriously when it tries to build up the suspense, and a totally vacuous plot.
Still, The Wind Singer made the same mistake: starting with an interesting idea, trying to get epic and then failing. But the sequel was excellent, so perhaps I will give Eoin Colfer another chance.