Review #850 - Stormbreaker

StormBreaker is the book of a movie that I quite liked the look of but never quite got round to seeing. Written by Anthony Horowitz, it is a teenage spy novel - James Bond as a 14 year-old, if you like - and is written very much with its target audience - early teenage boys - very clearly in mind. So much so, in fact, that it doesn’t have much appeal to anyone else. Well that’s not quite true - the concept is quite appealing - but I found the writing style is very off-putting. I shall expand on the later.

First, though, meet Alex Rider. Young, athletic, smart, he’s everything most teenage boys would like to be. The only thing is that with his parents dead his world is blown apart by the death of his uncle, Ian, who has brought Alex up for most of his life. At the funeral mysterious people are there whom Alex has never seen before, and soon after strange events lead Alex to realise that Ian did not in fact work for the bank as he had always believed. One thing leads to another and Alex ends up being what virtually amounts to press-ganged into the British Secret Service.

After some intensive training he gets his first assignment, which is based on a dodgy-looking rich foreigner who, as if being rich, dodgy-looking and a foreigner wasn’t enough to arouse deep suspicions, is also set to perform an entirely altruistic act of giving away thousands of free high-tech computers to schools all across the country. This state of the art piece of kit is called the “Stormbreaker”, and Alex must find out its secret before it’s too late. Following in the footsteps of his deceased uncle, he plays the part of a competition winner in order to infiltrate the centre of operations for the suspicious immigrant. The billionaire immigrant, Herod Sayle, may look funny but he’s certainly not stupid, so Alex will have to keep his wits about him. He also has a spooky employee called “Mr Grin” (courtesy of a circus accident involving sharp knives - ouch) among others.

Alex of course isn’t defenceless - he has various gadgets, as all spies must have. These come in the shape of innocuous-looking devices that any teenage boy is quite likely to have - a Game Boy, zit cream, etc. The plot leads from one set piece to another, with a few surprises along the way - though most adults reading this will find it fairly predictable stuff (the end twist particularly is very easy to spot). To be fair this is, as mentioned, squarely aimed at teenage boys and they’ll probably love it. I saw it for twenty pence in a charity shop, so I’m not too disappointed with it - though I wouldn’t have been too happy to pay the retail price of seven pounds minus a penny. (For approximate dollar and cent equivalents, simply double the figures!) There were a few bits that were quite cleverly done and some fairly sensible takes on serious issues - particularly the problem of immigrants not being accepted by indigenous populations - but mostly it was fairly simple James Bond for ids. (Then again I got bored of Mr Bond himself by about the age of 12!) The characters were reasonably well crafted, with Alex Rider being shown as a young person that kids can relate to, and we older ones can relate to having been once.

My main problem with the book though was the writing style. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I have a real hatred of writing that consists almost entirely of short sentences - to me there is no flow to it, something like a meal eaten one tiny piece of food at a time - one pea, one baby carrot, one tiny piece of beef, one pea, etc… with a pause between each small mouthful. All the elements are there, but they don’t go together well as there’s no blend of flavours, and it doesn’t feel like a complete meal. In the same way this book felt like it never got properly going to me, despite some decent plot elements. The easiest way to explain this is to give you an extract from the book:

“His only chance was the door that had first led him here. It led to the metal staircase that would bring him to D Block. There was a telephone in his room. Failing that, he could use the Game Boy to transmit a message. But MI6 had to know what he had found out.”

Large sections of the book are like that. Small sentences can of course be used to great effect, but when they’re 90% of the book, it drives me mad. If you read the passage above and saw nothing wrong with it, or you are buying the book for an early teenage boy (or if you are an early teenage boy!), add 2 stars to my rating. If you feel about the writing style the same way I do, you’re much more likely to agree with my rating. I still might well watch the movie one day though, as I suspect it will work better (for me anyway) as a movie than a book.

Overall Stormbreaker is not exactly a bad book, but the writing style drove me round the bend at times and I couldn’t really recommend it to anyone other than the target market. If you’re an adult wanting a spy novel, I couldn’t recommend any better book than The Ipcress File by Len Deighton - a true classic and very funny to boot.