Eoin Colfer: Artemis Fowl

"Eoin Colfer has secured the largest-ever advance for a children's novel by an unknown writer ... Film rights bought for a seven-figure price ... Inevitable comparisons to Harry Potter ... "

Such breathless publicity does make one sit up and take notice, but it also means this sparkling, golden book is judged against the hype, rather than in its own time.

One immediately asks oneself: how does this stand up against Harry Potter? Is this a classic in the making? And the answers are: not terribly well, and probably not.

Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed this book. It's a great story: clever, witty and more-ish. The evil, 12-year-old genius Artemis Fowl, scion of a long line of criminals, sets out to discover through high-tech wizardry the lore of the People - the fairies, goblins, leprechauns etc who have fled the Mud People (us) and now live at the Earth's core.

Artemis' goal is to steal a fortune of fairy gold, and he is loyally assisted by Butler, his butler, as adept at violence as Artemis is at scheming. Along the way we meet several fairy folk: Captain Holly Short is the star of the book but she almost comes to a sticky end when she's kidnapped by Artemis, and it looks for a while as if the whole of the fairy kingdom is under threat.

It all rollicks along, and Colfer has a fantastic imagination for detail: for fairy technology and weaponry, for personality and species traits (the tunnelling dwarfs with their hinged jaws and their awesome system for blowing earthworks out of their "bum-flaps"), and for mythology. But there is something disappointingly one-dimensional about the characters.

Somehow, we never get quite close enough to care, and the odd attempts to add complexity to Artemis (bizarrely, he is occasionally twinged by conscience, but it just doesn't ring true) jar, rather than round him out. It's all a bit like advertising: slick, shiny and highly entertaining and yet, really, as hollow as the love of fairy gold. It will make a terrific action movie, but would do best of all as a cartoon.

Viking

$19.95