Fowl Play

Chitra Subramanyam profiles the 12-year-old who has knocked old Harry Potter off his comfortable perch

Artemis Fowl
By Eoin Colfer
Viking
Price: 12.99 pounds (paperback: 2.99 pounds)

Eoin Colfer

There couldn’t be greater injustice done to Artemis Fowl, if he were compared to good ol’ Harry Potter, who has done a disappearing act this year. For Artemis Fowl is the very antithesis of Potter, J.K. Rowling’s creation, who has taken the world literally by storm. But comparisons are inevitable. For right now, it’s Harry Potter raj and no one dare step into that sacred territory.

But Eoin Colfer dares. And succeeds. Not surprising, as Artemis Fowl is a book that has to be read cover to cover in one sitting. There can be no other way. For Fowl, the 12-year-old criminal mastermind, has dared to do the unthinkable: take on the LEPrecon Unit of the fairy world, who prefer to live their lives away from the Mud People, as they disparagingly call us, the humans. Shades of the Muggles, you say sarcastically? Well, you are dead wrong. Colfer’s fairies have very limited magic power. And guess what? The Mud People drove them away from their shallow forts into the last human-free zone: near the earth’s core.

But back to Artemis, the character you’d love to hate. Fowl is the bad guy in the book — the genius who ‘‘has puzzled the greatest medical minds and sent many of them gibbering to their own hospitals’’. Fowl doesn’t fight the bad guys. He is the bad guy who dares to kidnap LEPrecon Unit’s Captain Holly Short, a fairy, and horror of horrors, steal the Book. For the uninitiated, it is a handbook written in Gnommish. A must for every fairy as it contains their history and commandments. The LEPrecon Unit, in case you are wondering, is an elite branch of the Lower Elements Police.
So, our dreaded 12-year-old with his sidekicks — bodyguard Butler, who learnt his specialised skills in Israel and Butler’s sister Juliet (a fanatic wrestling fan) — embarks on a mission to relieve the fairies of their gold and regain his lost family fortune.

Right now, it’s Harry Potter’s raj and no one dares step into that sacred territory. But Eoin Colfer dares. And succeeds. Not surprising, as Artemis Fowl has to be read in one sitting. There can be no other way.

And though Artemis has got them right where he wants them, things slowly start going the fairy way when they stop playing by the rules. In that perfect 21st century combination of weapons and communication, a rescue mission is undertaken by the LEPrecon Unit under the leadership of Commander Root. Combined with advanced technology created by the paranoid centaur Foaly (always seen wearing a tinfoil hat to prevent the FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA and MI6 from reading his mind), it seems as if the tables have turned. After all, Enid Blyton’s fairies never had a Neutrino 2000, a platinum handgun with a nuclear power source. It comes in three settings — scorched, well done and crisped to cinder. Or a buzz baton that hits the attacker with 1,000 volts. Nor did they have the deadly Blue Rinse — a devastating biological bomb that destroys only living tissue. The landscape, author Colfer informs us, remains unchanged. But our man Fowl has many more tricks up his sleeve. And for once, it isn’t the good that always win. For once, the fairies are as ‘bad’ as the Mud People. Thank God.

But more than anything, Artemis Fowl is a tribute to Eoin Colfer’s imagination and his ability to combine the modern and the fantasy. All this, tempered with just the right amount of humour. For in Fowl, Colfer creates (in his own words) a 12-year-old who ‘‘still retained a childlike belief in magic, tempered by a determination to exploit it’’. A frightening combination as the book perfectly exhibits. It was also through Fowl that Colfer, the 35-year-old elementary school teacher from Ireland, broke a record before the book hit American bookstores in May. This, by earning more than $1.5 million, the largest ever for an unknown children’s author.

And for those who want more, Colfer’s taken a two-year sabbatical from teaching to write his Artemis Fowl sequel. Complete with Captain Short, who goes on to become an expert in Artemis Fowl cases, we can rest assured that this will just get better and better.

And for the currently-on-sabbatical Rowling, all we have to say is: Take that, Harry Potter.