Artemis Fowl Themes

The hook of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl is that the protagonist, the titular Artemis Fowl, isn’t a traditionally heroic figure: he’s the heir to a major crime family. At first, the novel seems to be about a villain who is motivated by greed for gold. As the plot progresses, however, it becomes clear that Artemis’s foe Holly is in fact a sympathetic character and that Artemis’s motivations may be more complicated than they…

Artemis Fowl is a novel full of technology, some of which is real and was cutting edge when the novel came out (2001), and some of which is pure fantasy. Artemis’s ability to use technology to do things like decoding the fairy language and see through the fairies’ shields is how he earned his reputation as a child prodigy and shows what technology can accomplish. But while Artemis makes clever use of technology, the…

Twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl is a child prodigy in part because he has had to learn to survive without either of his parents. The absence of his father, Artemis Senior, hangs over the story, and although his mother Angeline is physically present, she isn’t lucid enough to act as a caretaker to her son. This causes Artemis to seek family in other ways, most notably from his bodyguard, Butler. Artemis comes to rely on…