Just the words. And the way they were put together.
I’ve been reviewing young adult books for Viewpoint for quite a while now, but I’ve only ever posted my first review, which was my scathing piece on Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Does My Head Look Big in This? which was subsequently republished in 14th anniversary collection put out by Viewpoint this year. The super-exciting part about this review was not only that it was republished, but a well-respected academic actually cited it and me in a recent article on in an equally well-respected Australian journal. She disagreed with me. Darn it. Well, with some of what I said. Her point was that the contradictions of Muslim vs modern teenage life actually served to make a new cultural point about Muslim life in modern Australia. My point was that, new cultural identity representation or not, average writing is just that and you can’t have Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on TV before it was invented for no good reason.
Since then, I’ve had a review published in every issue of Viewpoint, sometimes even two. Getting paid to read is living the dream, but only somewhat. It doesn’t pay the rent, but it does provide occasional beer money. It’s more ‘living the spare change’.
None of the reviews I’ve written since have been so negative, except maybe one, and even that one tried to be even-handed. This one was different. I would never have finished the book if it hadn’t been for some pig-headed, honest work-ethic that forced me to read every page. Mele advised against beginning the review with “This book is the reason teenagers don’t read books”.
She was right, but I stopped asking her advice after that. Here is the review in its entirety (before Mele gets her even-handed and sensible hands on it so that Viewpoint doesn’t come off sounding too rabid).
“Jimmy kicked his right leg up and back, sending his duvet flying towards the window. It wrapped itself around his attacker.” (p10) I challenge any person lay under a duvet and then kick it, one-legged, and send it flying in such a way that it wraps itself around a person.
In this and the previous issue of Viewpoint I have reviewed three action/adventure books, all aimed mostly at teenaged boys whose taste for literature and culture in general is heading towards the sensual thrill of action and adventure. These are boys who are finally starting to become men: at last they can run faster than their dads, overpower their siblings, hit a six and eat an entire pizza in one sitting. They want the culture they consume to reflect their lives and they are spoilt for media through which it is delivered.
In my review of Charlie Higson’s Double or Die I made a list of the sensory entertainments that books for modern teenagers are often trying compete with. I also commended Higson on actually writing a book, rather than another instalment of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Halo 2!” Books don’t need to compete with movies or video games because they are different. Not better, or worse, but different. Attempting to write a book to be like a video game is like trying to cook a hamburger like a soup. Jimmy Coates: Revenge (Harper Collins, 2007, 978-0-00-723285-7, price?) is just such a hamburger soup. Joe Craig has taken the ingredients of a really cool action story and, instead of preparing them individually to their own specifications and needs (spicing the mince in a bowl, slicing fresh tomato on a board, crispy-frying bacon and leaving it in a hot pan), he has given them all the same power-blend treatment, poured them into a big pot and cranked up the heat. The result is an action novel that, for all its glamorous settings, unbelievable fight scenes and detailed, near-future geo-political wranglings, tells a story that is somehow simultaneously bland and difficult to digest. To reheat the soup metaphor a final time before pouring it down the sink: the Mixmaster missed a few chunks here and there; every fifty pages or so a sentence hinting at emotional depth of character swims to the surface, but it disturbs the flow of the narrative and, like M&Ms in a bowl of Continental Tomato, probably should have been left out.
Jimmy Coates: Revenge is the third book in the Jimmy Coates series, which seems to be about a British teenager who is genetically modified from birth to be a programmable assassin working for the British government (I will explain the ‘seems’ part of that sentence in a moment). He can run very fast, fight anything that attacks him, see in the dark and (ahem) breathe under water. Don’t bother wondering how, that was probably explained in the first two books and obviously explained well enough so that a teenager with organic night-vision whose muscles are ‘programmed’ to work out while sleeping is perfectly acceptable. The third book has been written with the very firm assumption that its readers will definitely have read and enjoyed the first two instalments. There is precious little character background or history to this New York-set chapter in Jimmy Coates’ life. This isn’t so much a complete novel as a third chapter waiting impatiently for a screenplay. Pre-existing relationships aren’t so much worked into the text as lobbed at it from a distance. Old antagonisms, complex characters and supposedly-dead siblings appear without warning or introduction, forcing the reader to do that embarrassing thing of flicking back and re-reading most of the book in search of clues as to why one character hates another and who that Irish guy is. The respect for the reader that was present in Higson’s Double or Die is absent from Jimmy Coates: Revenge. In its place is a jittery sideways pinch for those kids lining up for the latest Alex Rider movie. No, not the book; the movie.
Even the writing itself seems unauthentic, as though Craig were not only writing for a 13-year-old in danger of losing interest in books, but like one. The prose gives impression that there was many a “suddenly” and a “then he” removed in the final edit and the level of humour doesn’t stretch much beyond naming the President of the United States ‘Grogan’.
For an action novel the ambitious action scenes themselves are surprisingly clumsy. Jimmy lunges from one confusingly-choreographed fight to another leaving behind a trail of elaborate physical descriptors as complex as the commentary for a break-dance competition. Legs, arms and other objects flip, roll, thrust, crunch and bleed. Jimmy experiences temporary pain, but his genetic programming swiftly brushes aside his injuries, whether from a kick to the head or a three-storey fall, and he fights on at top speed. In a book so reliant on computer game-style thrills, this is a surprising choice of trait to bestow upon a main character. God-mode is just as boring on paper as it is on screen.
The political elements of the novel are not so much inept as ill-considered. Although it is difficult to ascertain the exact details in this third part of the series, Craig has imagined modern-day Britain with its increasingly surveyed citizens into the near future as something of a dictatorship with its borders closed to foreign people and culture. The secret service is running things from behind the scenes and France is (for some reason) trying to start a war. Jimmy and his family have escaped to the United States to hide, but there are other Teenaged Genetically Engineered Government Assassins after him both from Britain and France. These super-teenage-assassins are essentially bred to murder people in spectacular and daring ways for their government and, although Jimmy is conflicted about his actions, he does them anyway, graphically and enthusiastically. The complaint here is not the obvious one about glorification of violence, for violence in art can be extremely stimulating, but the depiction of children being made to kill for the adults who control them. Maybe this was a moral argument that was played out in the first two books, but the fact that sending a child to kill amounts to child-abuse is never mentioned. The three teenaged assassins are all given various targets and only Jimmy tries to fight his instinct to kill. The other two positively revel in their enhanced murderous abilities and are treated by the narrative as moral adults hiding inside really cool children. No one weeps for their lost innocence or calls their masters and abusers nasty names. Without wanting to try to sell too many Amnesty International t-shirts, I wonder if Joe Craig had the couple of hundred thousand child soldiers around the world in mind as a possible audience when he created his own white, British one.
Jimmy Coates: Revenge is a dull book. From the whiz-splat technology to the genetically cloned characters to the comic-relief best friend who is so funny that you want Jimmy to poke him in the eye every time he utters another ‘joke’. Almost everything seems calculated to make the reader wonder if there’s dishes to be done. Even the computer-print-out font encourages one to scan the page, searching for information.
So, if poorly-acted, by-the-numbers, B-grade action movies are your thing, then by all means, go and rent any Jackie Chan movie made in Australia. Funnier, more enjoyable, cheaper and you even get a blooper-reel at the end.