Children's Fiction: To say of children's writers that they "know their audience" can imply compliment or criticism. As compliment, the comment suggests qualities such as integrity, respect and a sound grasp of the young person's emotional and intellectual interests and needs.
As criticism, it suggests condescension, a market-driven response to passing fads and an over-willingness to pander to the reader's most easily gratified urges. With the appearance of his third Artemis Fowl novel, Eoin Colfer demonstrates, as in its predecessors, that he clearly belongs in the first of these divisions. That he writes with such a robust and good-natured sense of humour is a welcome bonus.
Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code is structured as a series of confrontations: the essential aim is to pit one set of forces against another, with the extra complication that sides and loyalties, manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres, can switch with incredible rapidity. Artemis, the teenage criminal mastermind, may start what he declares will be "one last job" when he proffers his newly invented "cube that sees everything" to megalomaniac Jon Spiro, the intended pay-off being the metric ton of gold that Spiro will agree to hand over. But, especially after Captain Holly Short and her fairy forces enter the picture, the double-dealing that results from the boy's avaricious intention knows no bounds.
While these confrontations, played out in terrestrial locations stretching from north Dublin to Chicago via Knightsbridge and Tunisia, exhibit Colfer's knowledgeable fascination with the wilder workings of the new technologies, the novel is much more than mere futuristic self-indulgence. At its moral centre are questions about the nature of a society sapped by its materialism, questions touchingly raised for young Artemis by his father in his hospital bed.
"I want a new life for us all," says Artemis senior, apparently rejecting the "gold is power" family motto. Colfer traces, in all its ambivalence, the response which Artemis Junior will make to this challenge.
He also traces it very entertainingly. The style is playful, the language inventive and the puns excruciating: Artemis, we are told early on, puts lectures on the Internet under the pseudonym Emmsey Squire. But the greatest pleasure of all is to be derived from the novel's richly diverse cast of major and minor, old and new characters. Among the latter, watch out especially for Juliet, a force to be reckoned with in the ranks of potential bodyguards.
Robert Dunbar lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines, Dublin
Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code By Eoin Colfer Puffin Books, 329pp, £12.99