Novel. It is a children’s fantasy. It is the seventh book in Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series.
I have not read the book. This is not a chapter-by-chapter reading. The outline below comes from the publisher’s description, from a Guardian review, and from Common Sense Media.
What the book is
In the United States the title is The Atlantis Complex. It is also called Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex. In Britain the title is Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex.
Eoin Colfer is the author. Artemis Fowl is a teenage criminal in the series. By this book he also works with fairies.
Wikipedia records a British publication date of 20 July 2010, and a North American date of 3 August 2010. Common Sense Media lists the US publisher as Disney-Hyperion and the date as 3 August 2010. The Amazon listing for this ISBN names Hyperion and the same August date.
The ISBN-13 is 9781423128199. The Amazon listing uses the matching ISBN-10, 1423128192.
Public page counts do not agree. Wikipedia says 357 pages for the hardcover. Common Sense Media says 368 pages. I have not seen a copy, so I do not choose between them.
Wikipedia notes a last book after this one, The Last Guardian, in 2012. The Guardian’s review treats The Atlantis Complex as the penultimate title, and as a lead-in to that ending.
The Atlantis idea
Atlantis in this series is a city of fairies under the sea. It is not Plato’s island beyond the Pillars of Heracles. Plato’s Atlantis is a lost power in a philosophical dialogue. Colfer’s Atlantis is a place in a children’s adventure, with police, prisons, and machines.
The Atlantis Complex is not that city. It is an illness in the plot. The publisher’s description says it is common among guilt-ridden fairies, and not among humans. It says Artemis has it anyway, likely because he has handled fairy magic. The symptoms named there are obsessive-compulsive behavior, paranoia, and a second personality.
So the word Atlantis does two jobs in the title. It names the fairy city a villain wants to harm. It also names the breakdown in Artemis’s mind.
The plot as others describe it
I am not retelling scenes. This is the shape given in public descriptions.
Artemis has put his fortune into a project he thinks will help the planet. The Guardian review says the project would slow global warming by seeding snow clouds. He asks fairy officials to see the work. Common Sense Media places that meeting in Iceland.
Before the demonstration goes far, a fairy space probe arrives. It has been reprogrammed to attack Artemis and his friends. The publisher says a deadly enemy from Holly Short’s past wants to destroy the city of Atlantis itself. Holly is a fairy captain and Artemis’s ally.
Artemis is already ill. Common Sense Media says he is caught in paranoid and obsessive thoughts, and that Holly stuns him. Another personality, called Orion, then takes over. The Guardian describes Orion as romantic and foolish, and says Holly and the others have to carry the fight while Artemis is not himself. It names the weapons in that fight as amorphobots, sent by a villain called Turnball Root from a prison cell in Atlantis.
The same reviews bring back the usual companions. They name the bodyguard Butler, his sister Juliet, the centaur Foaly, and the dwarf Mulch Diggums. Butler has been sent to Mexico. Common Sense Media says that side of the story includes a wrestling show. The publisher’s description also mentions a giant squid.
The Guardian says Artemis returns only in stretches, and that Turnball’s motive includes devotion to his human wife. It reads the book as funny, inventive, and not fully satisfying as a plot, and as a step toward the last book.
My view
I keep this page so the title is not mistaken for a research book. The story does not offer a historical Atlantis. It does not offer a site, a date, or a text from the ancient world.
The useful distinction is the setting. Here Atlantis is an underwater fairy capital, still alive in the novel’s present. The “complex” is a sickness the author built for this plot. Guilt, magic, and a second self are story devices. They are not a clinical claim I would carry off the page.
I have not read the novel. I cannot judge the jokes or the pace myself. From the reviews, Colfer uses the illness to take Artemis out of command and to give Holly the lead. That is a choice about a character, not a claim about the past.
Sources
I used these public sources. I did not use the text of the book. I did not copy lines from it.
- Amazon listing for ISBN 9781423128199. Publisher description and edition details.
- Linda Buckley-Archer’s review in The Guardian, 29 October 2010.
- Common Sense Media review.
- Wikipedia, Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex, for the British title, the two publication dates, the ISBN, and the hardcover page count listed there.