Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
Puffin Books 2002
336 pages
Poor Artemis. The book ended up on my not-so-honourable mentions for 2007. I was surprised myself — I certainly didn’t expect that to happen when I picked up the book in the bookstore. Kids loved it, and there are numerous sequels (four now, I think?) and the cover was bright and sparkly and blue. And it had a young boy who is a genius trying to restore his family fortune, a loyal, kick-ass butler following the boy everywhere, and fairies. What’s not to like about a book like that?
Quite a few things, apparently, at least on my side. The first being the writing style. There were sentence fragments all over the place asfdfgdjjafk;. OK, sometimes they weren’t really sentence fragments — more like one-word sentences. It drove me nuts. Here, let me try scanning a random page from the book — this is somewhere on page 181:
Mulch nodded. Another room. Before his time ran out.
And again on page 185.
. . . There! Every ten seconds, a slight jump. On every screen.
I know using short sentences and having only one sentence in a paragraph is a common (and very easy way) to create a sense of urgency. Here I think Colfer went over the top. It irked me to a point that I was grinding my teeth as I skimmed down the pages. Well — that’s another benefit of really short sentences, I guess. You can read them really, really quickly. Also, there was an overuse of ellipses at times. As much as we like those three dots, they aren’t meant to be at the end of each paragraph in a suspenseful “let’s find the fairies” sequence.
It didn’t help that I didn’t like the first chapter. White kid and butler going about bossing and bullying people around in Ho Chi Minh City! Misplaced white supremacy in the twenty-first century in a South-East Asian country! What is this! (Of course, I realised later that Artemis treats everyone like that, but still, it ruffled my feathers at that point in time.)
Some of the themes about the conservation of the environment were about as subtle as a mallet to the head. The sense of humour didn’t appeal much to me either. Sorry, but jokes about dwarves passing gas isn’t really my cup of tea. Throwaway references in the narrative about the story — “but that is a story for another book”, “but that could only be read in an adult book”, etc — and other unsubtle hints to a sequel aren’t appreciated either. And while I try not to categorise books as “for girls” or “for boys”, I found myself thinking (somewhat guiltily) that maybe an eleven-year-old boy would enjoy this a lot more than I would. I wonder if that’s true.
I didn’t care much for any of the characters. The story itself was fast paced and action packed. A lot of bad-assery going on, with a touch of too much action/adventure. I half-expected something to go “KAPOW!” or “SPLAT!” in bright, colourful fonts. Possibly the graphic novel adapted from the book would have been a better media for me? It did, after all, win in the graphic novels for elementary/middle grade category for the Cybils.
I’m probably not picking the next books in the series. Unless someone convinces me otherwise. :p
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It’s always easier to rant about a book you disliked than praise something you really loved. I wonder why.
