Book Review: Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident Essay, Research Paper

Ice-cool ArtemisArtemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer 304pp, Puffin Just a twelvemonth after Eoin Colfer & # 8217 ; s Artemis Fowl captivated a host of immature readers, winning the writer the largest progress of all time for a new kids & # 8217 ; s novelist and a bevy of awards, its subsequence Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident takes up the play ( for we are now in an epoch of ceaseless narratives ) . Not for the technically fainthearted, this is a feverish merger of existent, fanciful and fairy gadgetry. From optical maser guns to mind-wipers, through battery-powered trade and anti-radiation suits, they make the work of James Bond & # 8217 ; s Q look like kid & # 8217 ; s drama. Helped by the add-on of faery thaumaturgy which makes anything possible, Colfer & # 8217 ; s innovation is illimitable, as the schoolboy anti-hero squads up with his former enemy, Holly Short, and her fairy constabulary force. ( Colfer & # 8217 ; s faeries are non the gossamer-wing type, but dressed to kill and willing to make so. ) Despite misgiving, the two sides must work together, as the faeries need Artemis & # 8217 ; s assist against the ill-famed B & # 8217 ; wa Kell & # 8211 ; a sort of bantam three & # 8211 ; while Artemis needs faery aid to make the deepnesss of Russia and outwit the

Mafiya, who are holding his father hostage. In Artemis Fowl Colfer blended Irish mythology with James Bond adventure to make a sparkling and tightly plotted fantasy about fairies and humans squaring up to one another; the larger scale and more complex structure of The Arctic Incident retains the sparkle, but lacks the focus. Colfer has embellished and increased his good-cop/bad-cop cast of goblins, fairies, and elves, all of whom are crossing and double-crossing each other in a series of plot strands that require absolute attention for fear that the “memory wipe” be turned on the reader by mistake. When Colfer returns to the central drama – Artemis’s trip to rescue his father – he gets back on track, ending the book with a most satisfying stakeout in which Artemis’s choice of action reveals that, despite being a criminal mastermind, he really does have a soft spot for his old dad. This, and the reappearance of the best of the original cast – Foaly, the techno-centaur in charge of defence, Mulch Diggums, the mud-eating dwarf (now stealing Oscars) and Holly Short, the renegade cop to whom Artemis is now drawn by something that is beginning to lean towards the sentimental – confirm Colfer’s storytelling flair.