Book Name: Artemis Fowl
Author : Eoin Colfer
Genre : Fantasy, I guess.
Ratings : 2/10
Browsing in Crosswords - Ebony, New Delhi, I saw this book on the shelf. It had a nice cover which sort of reminded me in some vague way about The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien (Though there were no similarities in the cover). I decided to try it out. After all, it was a fantasy book, wasn’t it? Anyway, I never expected it to be a really great one, and that was probably what made me not totally hate the book and myself for being so weak to give in to temptation and buy it. Many people really like this book, I can’t understand why, maybe its because of the fantasy hype created by the emergence of Harry Potter. But while Ms Rowling is a very nice writer and has some really good plots, Eoin Colfer has neither.
Artemis is a twelve year old really intelligent kid descended from a long line of legendary Irish criminals who has been taking care of himself after his father had seemingly died and his mother was in the border lines of lunacy. So Artemis has the freedom to do what he wants the way he wants. He is assisted by his Butler, a really brave, loyal and dangerous fellow.
The plot is simple. Artemis wants to steal Fairy Gold to restore his family fortune. How he manages to do that is simply too boring to try and explain or to understand. All you need to know that a book has some secret which he finds out and using his super brilliant mind finds a way to cash in. The Fairies from whom he tries to steal live under the earth and consider humans as ’’Mud People’’ who do nothing but fight and kill each other. Of course, they are billions of years more advanced than us and don’t mind using nukes to serve their purposes. Holly short is a LEPrecon. A Lower Elements Pollice and I don’t remember what the recon stood for. Maybe Reconnaissance Team and I really don’t want to bother checking even if I knew where I dumped the book. Holly is trapped by Artemis who holds her for ransom by threatening to reveal the existence of fairies to Humans. When LEP Retrieval forces are sent to Holly many weird things happen - a kleptomaniac dwarf doing what he does best - ’digging and entering’; a time stop; and a bio-bomb.
Although the plot is moderately OK, the writing style of Eoin Colfer leaves a lot to be desired. I am not against the book because - ’’The hero is a criminal. This is bad influence on kids.’’ I simply detest it because I didn’t like it. No one can blame me for that. But one little thing in this regard that really bugged me was the way the writer tried to develop sympathy in our minds for Artemis by depicting what a lonely, sad, insert word that will lead to deep sympathy etc... life he lead. It falls very short of its target. All that it succeeds in doing is making me get irritated by both Artemis, the criminal hero of the book and dislike the Fairies, the good people who are the villain here. The only shred of sympathy that I had after reading the book was for the author and her pitiable attempts at humour. And the end result is that the only character you really seem to like is the kleptomaniac dwarf and for the sole purpose that he eats garbage(!!).
After I read the book, I was filled with a sense of anger at which I was quite surprised since I had read many average and some really rotten books and after finishing them all I could do was laugh and search for another one. But the hype that this book had and also the positive reviews that I got about this book made me really think that I had a winner. And it really disappointed me.
This book is a classic example of a story being filled with words, a sorry insult of a plot, loads of clichés and none of the real literary genius required to actually make it deserve the status of ’’fantasy story’’. Nothing in the story was believable. The characters were quite flat and plainly irritating. As I have read over and over again, and many of you may be aware of, it is the ’’suspension of disbelief’’ which shows how good a fantasy book is, whether it gives you the belief that maybe, just a tiny chance that it might be true. Artemis Fowl, Book 1, DOES NOT!