Even without the hype, the money and the claims being made that it will rival the Harry Potter books, this tough talking, jargonised adventure seems little more than yet another sweaty Bruce Willis romp. It is filtered through smart-aleck, predictable and not very funny dialogue, and the balancing of the fantastical with the mundane human world is neither subtle nor seamless. Tone is another problem; the narrative is smugly knowing, like the authorial asides. Unlike the unobtrusive J.K. Rowling who never speaks down to her reader and allows her narrative to appear to evolve through a highly-detailed series of stated facts, Colfer all too often intrudes with hints of "I-know-what-happens-next". His formula is disconcerting: lots of technology and gadgets juxtaposed with fantasy elements, and a cast of disgruntled fairies/ leprechauns, a smelly killer troll, and an earth-moving, tunnel-making dwarf with a sorry record in petty crime and a tendency to break wind - gales of it. What magic there is too high-tech to create either wonder or surprise. It is all disappointingly ordinary, with flashes of too many TV fantasy/sci-fic programmes. It's not Disney nor does it even approach the level of Rowling's Harry Potter series.
Artemis, the central character, is a sullen, humourless, computer-obsessed 12year-old boy genius burdened by a highly adult criminal mind and a disastrous home life, featuring a chronically depressed, widowed mother. I'm not sure why Colfer decided to name his anti-hero after a Greek goddess of hunting and the moon, who was also the daughter of Zeus and the twin sister of Apollo. Still, perhaps it explains why Artemis, an unlikely candidate for souvenir tee-shirt fame, is so bad tempered - it can't be easy being burdened by a girl's name. As for Fowl - "fowl" - that is too easy.
Foil to the unappealing Artemis is Holly Short, a wrist-locator-wearing girl fairy, although we are quickly informed that "technically she was an elf, fairy being a general term. She was a leprechaun too, but that was just a job." In common with many heroines, she has problems with authority and discipline. Holly doesn't play by the rules, in this case those of Recon, a kind of fairy police force. She is the first female officer in the force's history and as expected there is a personality clash with Commander Root, her immediate boss. Holly may well have a future beyond the present book. She at least has a personality; Artemis fails to compel even as a brooding, troubled megalomaniac determined to maintain his family's nasty history. "The Fowls were, indeed, legendary criminals. For generations they had skirmished on the wrong side of the law, hoarding enough funds to become legitimate. Of course, once they were legitimate they found it not to their liking and returned almost immediately to crime."
The story opens with the dastardly young anti-hero devising a plan. He has a large manservant, Butler, who early on emerges as the moral centre of the novel. He is also the most interesting character, but then he has little competition. Aside from his loyalty to his evil little master, Butler is also devoted to his dizzy sister, Juliet, a kind of deluxe air-head. A meeting is arranged with an alcoholic old fairy. Artemis wants power, but to attain it he needs to infiltrate the secrets of the fairies.
Meanwhile Holly is having a crisis. Her powers are waning. Also, her last mission was a disaster. She is right to be worried. She heads to Ireland for her reviving acorn:
" . . . the old country . . the land where time began. The most magical place on the planet . . . And it was also here, unfortunately, that the Mud People [human beings] were most in tune with magic, which resulted in a far higher People-sighting rate than you got anywhere else on the planet. Thankfully the rest of the world assumed the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk. They had somehow got it into their heads that each fairy lugged around a pot of gold with them wherever they went. While it was true that LEP had a ransom fund, because of its officers' high-risk occupation, no human had ever taken a chunk of it yet. This didn't stop the Irish population in general from skulking around rainbows hoping to win the supernatural lottery."
Having decided to go to Tara, Holly quickly realises that "every traditionalist fairy with an overground pass would be dancing around the holy scene, so best to give it a miss". She chooses a riverbank but alas is captured by the waiting Artemis Fowl and Butler. He drives a hypodermic syringe into her shoulder. Not for the first time or the last in this novel you may find yourself asking exactly for whom Colfer has written it. "Artemis saw the pain in the creature's eyes as the hollow hypodermic plunged into her body. And for a moment he experienced misgivings. A female. He hadn't expected that. A female, like Juliet, or Mother. Then the moment passed and he was himself again."
Later, as action moves on to a large Co Dublin mansion, the Fowl family residence, Artemis experiences a bizarre interlude with his disturbed mother. Pining for her absent husband, she has dressed in her wedding gown. "Beside her was a facsimile of his father, constructed from the morning suit he'd worn on that glorious day in Christchurch Cathedral fourteen years ago. The clothes were padded with tissue, and atop the dress suit was a stuffed pillowcase with lipstick features. It was almost funny. Artemis choked back a sob, his hopes vanishing like a summer rainbow." All the while the boy's mother is mistaking her son for her dead father.
Holly, though captive, has not been forgotten and her colleagues attempt to save her. The resulting chaos develops into a ransom deal between the warring parties. It's all very violent, with hearts about to be punctured, lungs crushed, possible death, the dwarf breaking wind - and there are several bouts of vomiting. Even so, it is not very exciting. The sniping exchanges between the characters sustain an atmosphere of bad temper rather than bewilderment or friendship.
THIS is a disappointing book not least because it is more smart-aleck than zany. The Harry Potter books are a true phenomenon, and although I know them well enough to have answered all the questions, even the advanced wizarding ones, in a publisher's quiz competition as I waited to interview J.K. Rowling last summer in a Newcastle bookstore shortly before boarding the Hogwarts Express to Edinburgh with her, I have never said she was a great prose stylist - she does love adverbs. She also willingly acknowledges her debt to Tolkien, the master storyteller. But her art lies in her tone as well as the balance of imagination, fantasy, practicality, wonder and the ordinary. Her straightforward prose, with its wealth of detail and description, highlights the inconsistencies of Colfer's slicker, often cliched, use of language.
Why compare Rowling and Colfer in a review of his book, particularly as one is based in a school, the other features a fairy security force confronting a depraved boy genius? The comparison is inevitable because the marketing has created it. Colfer's publishers launched the battle cry "Watch Out Harry Potter" so we read the ordinary, chaotic Artemis Fowl with its bickering characters against a Potter backdrop that suddenly seems, as Albus Dumbledore might well say, "very superior indeed." On this performance, Harry Potter has far more to fear from Lord Voldemort than from Artemis Fowl.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of the Irish Times
