Eoin Colfer, Anthony Horowitz

AIRMAN Eoin Colfer, Puffin, 455 pages, paperback, NZ$25
ISBN 978-0-141-38336-1
ARTEMIS FOWLE AND THE LOST COLONY Eoin Colfer, Puffin, 376 pages, paperback, NZ$19.95
ISBN 978-0-141-32079-3
SNAKEHEAD Anthony Horowitz, Walker, 398 pages, paperback, $?? NZ$20
ISBN 978-1-4063-1228-7

“I’m so sick of you smart kids,” moans a thwarted villain, "Why can’t you just boost cars or steal stuff like normal kids?”

This is a great time to be a young male reader. Eoin Colfer and Anthony Horowitz are producing a torrent of lively, readable adventures with bright young heroes overcoming insuperable odds. If that sound rather like those hefty volumes of boys’ stories presented as prizes in the mid-twentieth century, that’s because they share colourful characters, well-described settings and rattling good plots.

Colfer’s newest creation, Airman, is Conor Broekhart who is literally born in the air (in a crashing dirigible) and then becomes an early pioneer of manned flight. As always, Colfer’s imaginative plots and detailed descriptions overwhelm the reader. No sooner has teenage Conor improvised a hang-gliding kite to rescue his beloved Princess Isabella from a fiery death on a blazing turret than he is cast into an underground dungeon as a traitor.

Escape from slave labour in the diamond mines of Grand Saltee seems impossible but Conor’s inventive genius, and his knowledge of things aerial enables him to make a desperate attempt for freedom. Will he regain his lost love? Will he be able to return to his family? Or will the evil Marshall Bonvilain, high commander of the Saltee Army destroy them all? Packed with Colfer’s trademark imagination and dry wit, this is a magnificently readable story.

Even more interesting villains make their appearance in the fifth of the Artemis Fowl series. The Lost Colony of the title is Hybar, the home of imps and demons. Artemis, the 14 year old master criminal and tactical genius, continues his efforts to keep the existence of the supernatural world a secret but he faces a double challenge. The deeply confused demons have hopes of reaching Earth using a copy of Lady Hetherington Smythe’s Hedgerow as their guidebook, but their existence is suspected by Minerva, a 12 year old computer genius who intends to capture a demon in order to win a Nobel Prize. Artemis finds himself strangely attracted when he meets Minerva. “Young, quick and arrogant,” he says, "You remind me of someone.”

The usual larcenous gnomes, felonious pixies and hi-tech centaurs make their appearance but the most attractive character in the story is No1, an embarrassingly inept imp, who soon discovers he has special powers. On Earth No 1 rapidly acquires a new vocabulary, including pink, cappuccino and candy-floss. The plot is complex and fast-placed with carefully detailed settings and several witty twists, including a revelation at the end which suggests the next Artemis Fowle adventure will be three times as good.

Anthony Horowitz’s popular boy spy, Alex Rider, was last seen in an orbiting space station. In Snakehead his relief at being rescued from his re-entry module is short-lived, as the Australian SIS applies some unsubtle leverage. Lured by the promise of learning more about the death of his parents, Alex finds himself posing as an Afghan refugee in Thailand, working with his godfather. Their operation against a people-smuggling ring becomes entangled with an MI6 operation in Bangkok and also attracts the attention of Major Yu, the deadliest member of the Scorpia world crime syndicate.

While coincidences abound, the action is dramatic and the settings – Asian slums, a container ship, an illicit organ-transplant hospital, and an ocean drilling rig – are convincingly detailed. Events sometimes become grim but Alex’s best weapon is always his initiative. Snakehead is a well-researched and dramatic addition to the Alex rider series.

Trevor Agnew

This review was first published in The Press, Christchurch NZ, on 29th March 2008.

The Supernaturalist Eoin Colfer

The Supernaturalist Eoin Colfer, Puffin, 291pages, paperback NZ$19.95
ISBN 0-141-38041-1

Eion Colfer’s grim future city offers everything the body wants and nothing the soul needs. It also has street gangs, toxic fumes, an unstable satellite control system, rapid- response combat-lawyers, and orphanages for product testing.

This stunningly detailed dystopia is the background for the imaginative adventures of Cosmo, a 14 year-old foundling, who confronts a plague of eerie blue parasites. Cosmo joins an odd gang of misfits, the Supernaturalists, who share his ability to see these parasites. Their battles across the rooftops are exciting but after an alarming discovery the trio give up in despair. Colfer, however, has several plot twists, some horrors from Cosmo’s past and a hundred more pages to go. As always he is plausibly inventive. His street weapons, in particular, are worryingly convincing.

Trevor Agnew

This review first appeared in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand in 2004.

The Wish List, Eoin Colfer, 2003

THE WISH LIST, by Eoin Colfer, Penguin Viking, 2003, 168 pages, paperback, NZ$19.95.
ISBN 0-670-04058 4.

“Brilliant. Totally original” – Satan

Meg Finn is a name to put beside Huck Finn and Harry Potter. We need strong female characters in novels for young people, and Eoin Colfer has created an excellent one. Meg’s appeal is not limited by the fact that she is dead by page 9. In fact Meg becomes really interesting after she dies.

Since Meg was murdered by her accomplice, Belch, while robbing an elderly pensioner, she might not seem an ideal role model. In fact Satan is looking forward to using Meg’s talents to make Hell a worse place. Her use of a television set to punish her evil stepfather had been so fiendish that even Satan was impressed, “Brilliant. Totally original.” Meg, however, is not for burning. Her sins exactly match her good deeds and so she goes neither to Heaven nor Hell. Instead, she is sent back to Ireland.

In a deal worked out between St Peter and Beelzebub, Meg has to help her victim, Lowrie McCall, to carry out his last four wishes. This is where The Wish List moves from good to great. Not only is Meg trying to save her own soul; she also becomes deeply involved with Lowrie’s ambitions. They make an odd couple but when Meg finds she can occupy Lowrie’s body and read his thoughts, their relationship becomes simultaneously hilarious and poignant.

Here she is on Croke Park, trying to make Lowrie’s body kick a ball:
“Meg licked Lowrie’s finger and stuck it into the wind. Then the taste of tobacco bit into the tastebuds she was inhabiting. ‘Oooh,’ she groaned, spitting on to the grass. Of course, being in possession of ancient nicotine-drenched lungs, quite a bit more stuff came up than she was expecting. ‘That’s disgusting. What’re you doing to yourself?’ …Residual memories erupted from the stands, urging long-retired teams to victory. All around her, shades of past players dodged, weaved and hacked the legs from under each other when the ref wasn’t looking…She could feel Lowrie’s heart pound with excitement. Finally, after fifty years, he was fulfilling a dream.”

Lowrie’s wishes are not easy to carry out and some aspects put his own soul in danger. Good and evil are real forces here, and the sequence where Lowrie moves from revenge-seeking to reconciliation is a microcosm of what Ireland needs.

The sparring match between Beelzebub and St Peter is amusing, but Colfer wisely spends very little time in Hell. He has fun hinting at the identity of its inhabitants, who include mime artists, lawyers, Oscar-winners, members of boy bands, and – thanks to Satan’s “own your own soul after a century” offer – computer experts.

There hasn’t been such a good novel about a young person’s redemption since Alan Bunn’s Water in the Blood, and there has never been a funnier one

Trevor Agnew

This review was first published in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand on June 7th 2003.

ARTEMIS FOWL: The Eternity Code, Eoin Colfer, 2003

ARTEMIS FOWL - THE ETERNITY CODE by Eoin Colfer, Puffin, 2003, hardback, 329 pages, NZ$19.95. ISBN 0-670-91352-9
Reviewed by Trevor Agnew

Fowl Fun

Artemis Fowl is a richer, selfish and more self-aware hero than Harry Potter but equally readable. Young readers already know, and love to read, Artemis Fowl from his first two volumes. (My biggest problem in writing this review has been foiling young readers’ attempts to purloin my copy.) Now I am urging all open-minded adults to read Eion Colfer’s novels, because they are fresh, fast-moving and often very funny.

The present gulf between children’s books and adults’ books is relatively recent. Ann Thwaite, a New Zealander, in her excellent life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, points out that “everyone”, young and old, originally read The Secret Garden, Heidi, Treasure Island and Alice in Wonderland. Then children’s books moved off into their own reservation. The wheel turned full circle recently when J.K. Rowling’s publishers re-issued the Harry Potter novels in sombre covers, so that adults could read them without being embarrassed.

Which brings us back to Artemis Fowl. In his third adventure, The Eternity Code, he is now 13 and has created (or rather pirated fairy technology to make) the Cube, a communication device which renders all existing computer technology obsolete. This earns him the hostility of Spiro (a ruthless computer mogul best summed up as Not-Bill-Gates) and his brutal minder Arno, a tattooed New Zealander. (Clearly Colfer didn’t waste time during his visit here last year.) After being dentally challenged by one of Artemis’s explosions, Arno wears transparent dentures half-filled with blue oil. Colfer delights in yukky details like this; several sequences are rated VA: vexing to adults but a delight to adolescents.

Before the dust of the first chapter’s conflict has settled. Butler the faithful bodyguard is dead or at least in cryogenic storage. Captain Holly Short of the Lower Element (read fairy) Police comes to the rescue again, though with unexpected results. Artemis makes new colleagues (he doesn’t really have friends) and meets old ones. Juliet is Butler’s little sister, able to break down and reassemble 90% of the world’s production weapons, as well as doing her makeup in under four minutes. She and Holly do most of the fighting, while Mulch Diggums, the tunnel dwarf, who can snag cockroaches with his beard-hair, develops a new career as part of their burglary-and-rescue team.

The text is a witty delight. Spiro’s computer empire is called Fission Chips, and Stonehenge was built by the fairies as “an outlet for a flat-bread-based food. Or, in human terms, a pizza parlour.”

Artemis’s emotional development is interesting. Like his father, Artemis is undergoing some sort of moral enlightenment, and at one point even makes a massive donation to Amnesty International. Of course his spiritual transformation is not quite complete; he retains a 10% finder’s fee.

By the end of The Eternity Code a fairy mind-wipe seems likely to leave a mere shell of the old Artemis, bundled off to boarding school and separated from computer and laboratory. Or will Artemis outwit everyone again? Fowl play may well triumph in Volume 4.

Trevor Agnew

First published in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand on May 3rd 2003.