Artemis Fowl: the Last Guardian Review

Well here we are at the end of the Artemis Fowl series. It goes out on a high, but certainly isn’t the best that Colfer’s produced.

The Artemis Fowl series started with an 11-year-old boy, who seemingly used nothing but pure logic and intellect to make decisions, with no concept of ethics or morality.

The core of the series has always been the personal development of Artemis himself, which started at the end of the first book.

The changes that have occurred to the central protagonist’s personality are fully manifested in this book, with Artemis’s intelligent conclusions coming second place to his more emotional concerns. He also experiences some loss of confidence in the face of being outfoxed.

One great contrast that Eoin Colfer throws in is between Artemis and his brother, who is, like Artemis in intellect, but has a twin, who he loves and could not survive without. We get the impression that Artemis could have saved himself a lot of repressed emotions, had he had something similar and not grown up alone and with little to no emotional input. To this effect, he grew into the near emotionless boy that kidnapped Holly Short in the first book.  

Right…now the bad bits.

Mulch Diggums is always welcome in any story, but the way he gets involved in this one is a bit contrived. He pops up out of nowhere and has an excuse for it that kind of undermines most of the character development he’s had in all the preceding novels.

The characters don't really develop much and some do take a couple of steps backwards for the sake of the plot's convenience. 

The intelligence gap between Artemis’s two brothers seems weird and a bit unbelievable. I still don’t get how Opal Koboi manages to escape, as the method does seem to rely on completely undermining the time travel rules established The Time Paradox, with an excuse that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Enterprise.

Moving on, at this point, the level to which Artemis is physically useless goes too far and the idea that he’s that intelligent, yet hasn't figured out a way to not be so dyspraxic loses almost all believability.

Overall, this isn’t bad, Artemis Fowl goes out on a high, but the ending is a bit clichéd. In my mind this book is at 7 on the quality list. It’s better than The Atlantis Complex, but the others clearly outstrip it.