[In a
development that I’m sure will shock precisely no one, my 13 (!!!) and
about-to-be 12 year-old sons
are both huge readers. They are fans of many
authors and books, but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on, well,
series—Young Adult series in particular—that they love. Please share your YA
recommendations, series or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the fraught pleasures
of rooting for an anti-hero, and how a popular series transcends them.
I’ve written a
good bit in
this space about the emphasis
on anti-heroes in prominent recent
TV shows (often through the now-deeply-fraught lens
of House of Cards, but I suppose
the ongoing
revelations of Kevin Spacey’s history of disturbing and criminal behavior
only adds one more layer to his character Frank Underwood as an anti-hero par
excellence). As I’ve noted in most of those posts, I have deeply mixed feelings
about this trend and such characters, or more exactly see them as straddling a
very fine line: between a realistic depiction of human flaws on one side, flaws
that the characters themselves recognize and are at least somewhat committed to
working on, even if they (realistically) fail more often than they succeed (a
la Dominic West’s Jimmy
McNulty on The Wire); and a
celebration of their dastardly ways on the other side, a narrative that
requires the characters to remain anti-heroic and indeed become more villainous
over time (a la Brian Cranston’s Walter
White on Breaking Bad). I get the
appeal of the latter version, but to me it plays into some pretty ugly sides of
human nature, and leaves me feeling more sleazy than entertained.
The character at
the heart of one of the boys’ recent favorite YA series,
Artemis Fowl, consistently and complicatedly straddles that line to be
sure. Introduced by Irish author Eoin
Colfer in 2001’s
Artemis Fowl (the first of eight
Fowl books in a series that concluded with 2012’s Artemis
Fowl: The Last Guardian), the teenage Fowl is the smartest kid in the
world, a scion of extreme wealth, and seemingly devoid of any morals, making
him more or less a James Bond villain in training. That first novel centers
entirely on one such villainous plan of Fowl’s, and to be honest when I
listened to the audiobook version with the boys (they got into those, read
by the wonderful Nathaniel Parker, after finishing reading the series) I
found myself rooting hard (if silently) against Fowl as a result (not the
intended reader response in a book entitled Artemis
Fowl, I venture to guess). While Fowl does gradually grow to care about
various fellow characters (on some of whom more in a moment) over the course of
the series, I’m not sure he ever stops straddling this fine line, and indeed
would argue that many of the plotlines present his evil mastermind qualities as
helpful and even necessary to defeating the books’ challenges and (other)
villains).
Fortunately for
readers of (and semi-unwilling listeners to) the Fowl books, Colfer also creates
a wonderfully rich fantasy universe alongside the 21st century real
world of his anti-hero protagonist. That world, known as the Lower Elements,
is populated by all manner of fantastic creatures (known collectively as The People or fairies) who
at one historical point lived on the Earth’s surface but have long since
retreated to their underground setting. Colfer creates the world of the Lower Elements
with remarkable depth and detail, and populates it with a number of wonderfully
realized individual characters, most working for the Lower Elements
Police Recon (LEPRecon, natch) force. Besides all their own merits and
appeals, this community adds a vital aspect to the books: since they’re
entirely separate from the human world, they both take Artemis Fowl down a
significant peg and allow more resisting readers like this AmericanStudier to
likewise engage with the series in a way that doesn’t require an embrace of or
even an emphasis on the anti-hero title character. They are, dare I say it, a
genius touch, if not at all an evil one.
Next series
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this post? Other YA lit series, books, or authors you’d highlight?
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