What do you mean, all the Alex Rider books take place in the span of a single year?
Boiling Seas 2 announcements are being prepared as I sort out artwork/proofing/some level of publicity. Stay tuned. For now, have a review-like ramble, and be warned for (very light) spoilers for the newer Alex Rider books.
I’ve always liked spy stories. When I was a kid I practically wore out our VHSes of From Russia With Love and Octopussy (the only Bond films we had at the time, which explains why I still have a soft spot for the Roger Moore era, campy as it is).
And I read the Alex Rider books dozens of times over. A teenage Bond was exactly what I wanted, and I devoured the original 6 books. The next 3 (Snakehead through Scorpia Rising) I still enjoyed, but I was growing up a little by then, and though they did get darker to match my ageing they didn’t quite hit the spot in the same way those first 6 did. But I still loved them. I even watched the film, though somehow I still haven’t watched the TV show. It was never going to win any Oscars but on the scale of children’s books adapted into movies, it’s definitely closer to Narnia than Eragon.
The original and best cover artwork. Alas, my Eagle Strike doesn’t match the rest of the six…Horowitz can really write a spy story. He can write a James Bond story too – I read his Forever and a Day recently as well, and it’s a fantastic Bond book. Without wishing to offend Charlie Higson, Alex Rider was always much better than the Young Bond series.
Then recently I found out that Horowitz had picked up the series again after a 6-year break. I managed to find a copy of Never Say Die at my library, and I eagerly dove back into the world of Horowitz’s teenage spy. What stories will he tell now he’s a young adult? I thought to myself as I opened the book. It had been so long, I was looking forward to seeing Alex Rider mature.
And then I realised that, contrary to my memory of the series, all nine of the preceding books had taken place while Alex was still 14 years old.
My mind was boggled. This kid had fought international assassins, stopped a nuclear war, brought down media moguls, beaten up his own evil twin and been to space in the space of one year. I genuinely thought that each book had taken place months apart – in my head, Alex had been about 12 at the start but had finished the original run aged about 17. (I realise now that I’d been mixing him up with Artemis Fowl, who does, rather more sensibly in my opinion, age as the series goes on.)
Never Say Die opens with Alex aged 15. He’s still a kid. A highly traumatised kid, but a kid nonetheless. I started the newer books with a healthy level of scepticism – but in fairness to Horowitz, he makes it work. Alex Rider has always been a reluctant agent of MI6, but in Never Say Die, Secret Weapon and now Nightshade, Horowitz really plays up the angle that he doesn’t want to do this. He’s done with getting shot and stabbed and burned. He’s a teenager who wants to live his life, and the fact that he’s failing miserably in school (which makes much more sense given that he’s skipped the best part of a whole year rather than the few weeks at a time that I thought he’d missed) doesn’t help either.
But Nightshade is a different story. For the first time Alex is confronted by what he could have become, in the shape of brainwashed child assassins – better trained than him but utterly lacking conscience. It’s a theme that Scorpia began to touch on, but only for Alex himself, and he was able to resist that reprogramming. But when faced with a glimpse of what MI6 could have turned him into if they’d had fewer morals, Alex reassesses what he’s been through. It’s a really effective way of giving the series a fresh angle on the life of a teenage spy. For the first time, Alex wants to stop these people – not just because they’re threatening the world but because he genuinely thinks them evil.
In short, if you ever enjoyed Alex Rider as a kid, pick up the newer books. Despite the fact that I’m a decade older, I’m enjoying them just as much as I ever did.
