‘Every
bored schoolboy’s fantasy, only a thousand times funnier, slicker and more
exciting... genius.’ – The Independent on Sunday
‘Horowitz
will grip you with suspense, daring and cheek – and that’s just the first page!
... prepare for action scenes as fast as a movie.’ –
The Times
These
are the taglines printed on the cover of the book. They’re heaping praise and
lavish recommendation on this book, overflowing in their efforts to get you to
read and love them. In some ways these words are accurate, but in one respect
they’re sorely misleading; whether the books are actually good or not.
The
synopsis and plot of this series is rather simple; almost patronisingly so.
Alex Rider is a 14 year-old teenager from London (wherever the hell that is),
who wakes up one day to find that his only living relative, his uncle Ian
Rider, has died. What’s more, it turns out that Uncle Ian was actually a spy
working for MI6, and that his death was no accident. He was murdered whilst on
a mission! Alex ends up being drafted into MI6 and sent to complete the job
that his uncle started. After uncovering the sinister and, dare I say it, quite
childish villain’s scheme in Stormbreaker,
Alex then has eight or nine more novels to fill with other dubious stories of
teenage espionage, with the deliberately hanging plot-thread of facing his
uncle’s killer to try and keep us reading through the whole series. I managed
until as far as book three before I packed it in.
In
particular, one aspect leapt out at me from these recommendations. It is the
notion of ‘slick writing’ and the ‘action
scenes as fast as a movie’. This straight away struck a negative chord
within me – that in order to advertise these novels, reviewers feel that they
have to compare them to films. Maybe it was just a feeling of turn-of-the-century
cynicism that marketers, imagining that the only thing that would appeal to
Generation-Y youngsters was some form of screen-based entertainment, and that
the only way to make them even consider reading a book was to say “Hey it’s all
right kids! This is basically a movie!”, but I myself would consider it
immensely patronising. Nobody needs to be told that this thing is almost as
good as something completely different. A good film is a good film, and a good
book is a good book. A good film cannot really be described as any better than
a good book, and vice versa.
Comparisons
with Harry Potter are unavoidable.
Here you have two Young Adult British literary heroes of the turn of the
century, icons for readers of its age-range. Though the Harry Potter series has
substance, pacing, excellently written characters, admirable morals and even, I
would say, something approaching an engagement with reality, all Alex Rider has is a desire to be a
movie; the writing is brief, almost anorexic in its layout. Maybe you’re happy
with this from the printed word, but I can’t help but feel that this is merely
the literary equivalent of a branded cereal-bar; small, unsatisfying, and
ultimately forgettable beyond the range of “Oh yeah, I had one earlier today.”
Maybe I’m being a bit harsh; I mean, don’t let my negativity mislead you – it
has certainly got a sense of style. It gets the story and the drama across.
But, to use a cliché (something Horowitz has been known to do from time to
time), Alex Rider is very much ‘style
over substance’. Like Alistair MacLean, only with more trainers and sports
bicycles.
Many
of the characters are actually nothing more than sly summaries, a witty little
phrase written to give the illusion of there being something more there. And
those are the good characters. One of them, Jack Starbright, is set up to be a
lot more important a character than she actually is – a girl with a masculine
name, an American student or something who became Ian Rider’s house-keeper, and
is now essentially Alex’s guardian and sole friend; or at least would be if she
had anything more to do in these novels than be mentioned a couple of times in
passing. In effect she’s nothing more than a plot device, something that Alex
Rider’s bosses in MI6 can blackmail him with should he not co-operate with
them. Deport her back to the USA and send him to an orphanage, that sort of
thing. She could have been utilised for some necessary character development
for Alex or something, but that was quite obviously too boring for a series of
action novels for teenage boys, and so she’s left to gather dust.
Now
then, Alex Rider himself.
“He rolled out of bed and walked over to the
open window, his bare feet pressing against the carpet pile. The moonlight
spilled onto his chest and shoulders. Alex was fourteen, already well-built,
with the body of an athlete. His
hair, cut short apart from two thick strands hanging over his forehead, was
fair. His eyes were brown and serious.” [Stormbreaker. Pp. 7-8]
Don’t you hate him already? It could have almost worked as
an introduction, apart from those little ‘serious’ brown eyes of his. We’re
told that Alex is a serious character, and occasionally he broods over his lot
in life for a sentence or two before the next hair-raising action scene. He
gets snarky at people if they take umbrage with him, and he gets a couple of
gadgets doled out to him every book – 21st century middle-class
white-kid toys that have one or two nifty features built into them, which are
bound to come in handy at just the right time. We get a fair amount of
product-placement here as well; never an end to those things that teenagers
love, like Game Boys, Michael Owen, and Coke.
The stories are all basic, hum-drum. Stormbreaker involves Alex sneaking around a rich-man’s villa to
work out why he’s giving a bunch of free computers to every school in the
country; answer, they’re filled with poison-gas or radioactive
something-or-others which will wipe out every last one of the UK’s kids,
because the villain was bullied at school. Yep, that’s the reason behind the
plot. Point Blanc has Alex posing as
a rambunctious rich-kid sent to an exclusive school high in the Alps, to find
out what its founder, Dr Grief, is doing to them. It seems he’s cloning them and
having his mind placed inside each and every one of these kids, so he can get
himself into privileged positions of power around the globe and therefore take-over-the-world! Oh yes, and he’s a
massive racist from South Africa who was annoyed when Apartheid ended, just in
case you didn’t realise he wasn’t a very nice man. And lastly, because I don’t
really care to read any more of them, Skeleton
Key has Alex snuck under-cover into a mini-Cuba with a couple of CIA agents,
to investigate a retired Soviet general who for some reason has gotten his
hands on an atomic bomb.
There’s nothing more to it than that. The Alex Rider series is a bunch of
fast-paced YA novels about an unwilling teenage spy – or superspy, as the
marketers thought to style him; I don’t know why, as there doesn’t seem to be
anything that super about him. Easy to read, but instantly forgettable; if you’re
twelve, then you might like it. Or read Harry
Potter instead, a series that actually has a story, good characters, and
depth (reviewed September 2014, if you want reasons for why Rowling is good). Horowitz
has achieved some degree of success as a writer, so clearly he knows his
market. I just think younger readers deserve something a tad more worthwhile
than this.
Bibliobreaker
Horowitz, Anthony. Stormbreaker. Walker Books. (2000)
Horowitz, Anthony. Point Blanc. Walker Books. (2001)
Horowitz, Anthony. Skeleton Key. Walker Books. (2002)
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