66 pages • 2 hours read
Eoin ColferA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Content warning: This section of the study guide contains discussions of violence and abduction, alcohol use disorder, and use of drugs (sleeping pills) to force compliance without consent.
The prologue introduces the book as “the by now famous account of his first villainous venture” (1). It suggests that this is best way to portray Artemis, described as a child prodigy whose mind has caused confusion among the foremost of the world’s psychiatrists.
The story, the narrator of the prologue continues, details how Artemis planned to regain his family’s fortune. The plan has great potential for chaos, even a “cross-species war.” Artemis is only 12 years old.
In Ho Chi Minh City, Artemis Fowl and his bodyguard, Butler, are waiting in a café for a man named Nguyen. When a waiter comes to the table, Artemis immediately tells him to sit down, recognizing from his loafers, shirt, and three gold rings that he must be their contact.
Nguyen shows the boy a photograph with a green hand visible in it. He adds that it is of a woman who works as a healer nearby. She is intoxicated all the time.
They coerce the man into taking them to the woman. On their way, Artemis wonders if his quest is finally at an end. They arrive in an alley, and Nguyen points to a spot under the fire escape.
Artemis puts on night vision glasses and calls out for the woman, saying he has a proposal for her. She responds by asking for wine and seeking confirmation that he is English. Artemis corrects her, saying that he is Irish. The woman insists on wine, and Artemis hands over a bottle of whiskey Butler was carrying.
Artemis also tells Butler to pay Nguyen. Then, he asks the healer for her “Book.” She is quiet, then removes her shawl to reveal a long nose with two slitted eyes: She is a fairy. When she threatens Artemis, he reveals that the whiskey he gave her was actually holy water. She screeches, saying that he has killed her.
Artemis says that if she gives him her Book for 30 minutes, he will give her both an antidote of spring water from the ring of Tara where he found a fairy well and an injection that will heal her alcohol addiction. He offers to give her the first as an act of good faith. Butler gives her the vial, and she instantly feels better.
She gives Artemis the Book, believing that the boy will not be able to read it. Butler takes photos of its pages. Then they administer the second injection, which painfully removes the alcohol from the fairy’s system. Artemis and Butler leave.
On the plane, Butler asks why they didn’t leave the fairy to die, and Artemis explains that he didn’t want any evidence. He doesn’t want the People—the other fairies—to become suspicious.
Butler and Artemis were paired when Artemis was born, just as all Fowls are protected by members of the Butler family. For Artemis, the man is nearly a father, and for Butler, Artemis is nearly a friend.
Butler thinks that Artemis will achieve much more than his father.
The narrator introduces the chapter in direct address to the reader with “[b]y now, you must have guessed just how far Artemis Fowl was prepared to go in order to achieve his goal” (18). His ultimate endgame, however, is finding gold.
Artemis’s plan began two years earlier, when he started researching fairies. Each of the legends he read mentioned a “Book carried by each fairy” (18) that contained their history and the rules for their lives.
Arriving home from Ho Chi Minh City, Artemis checks on his mother Angeline before getting to work. Angeline does not leave her bedroom and hasn’t been well since Artemis’s father disappeared a year ago.
Artemis greets Butler’s sister, Juliet, who is morose; she apparently left a gap in the curtains in Artemis’s mother’s bedroom, making Angeline unhappy and unrested.
Artemis goes up to his mother’s room. She has anxiety and is known to experience delusions. Artemis lies and says that he was in Austria on a school trip. He closes the curtains for her, and she says that they should fire the maid. Artemis knows that she will not remember that the maid is Juliet, so he suggests that Butler’s sister would be great at caring for her. Angeline Fowl agrees.
When they hug, Angeline says that she can hear things at night and fears that they’re after her. Then, she becomes increasingly paranoid; she no longer recognizes Artemis and thinks that her son has been replaced.
Artemis gets to work translating the Book. It is more difficult than he imagined, as the language is a mix of symbols and characters. He notices a small male figure symbol and thinks that it is similar to an Egyptian symbol. He begins to find other similarities with Egyptian but makes slight adjustments. The order of words is also unusual, as it reads in spirals, and Artemis manually puts each symbol in order before putting it in the translator.
Finally, the computer converts the fairy language, and the first few sentences appear on Artemis’s screen, revealing the full title of the Book to be “THE BOOKE OF THE PEOPLE. BEING INSTRUCTIONS TO OUR MAGICKS AND LIFE RULES” (27).
Artemis is thrilled, believing that he will soon be able to control the fairies. He calls for Butler and Juliet and asks them to help him assemble the remaining pages to be translated.
The narrator turns to the history of the Fowl family. They are a family of criminals. Artemis Senior invested in illegal shipping lines into Russia; the Russian Mafia destroyed the boat on which Artemis Senior—and Butler’s uncle—were traveling. While it had not robbed the Fowls of all of their wealth, it made a significant dent, and Artemis the Second wishes to restore it.
His ultimate goal is to gather gold from the People, as each fairy had their own collection of it. With the Book, he can figure out how to achieve this end.
After sleeping, Artemis goes to his study, where he has kept the news channel CNN on ever since his father’s disappearance. He requests that Butler shut it and all of his computers off so that he can focus on the translation of the Book. Butler thinks that Artemis is finally giving up on his father’s return. Artemis gets to work.
The opening chapters establish Artemis’s early characterization, offer allusions to Irish folklore, and introduce themes while providing needed backstory.
The Prologue attempts to introduce Artemis as a villain, but as details reveal more about his family situation and his motivations for enacting his scheme, his status as an anti-hero is soon clear. The narrator of both the Prologue and the Epilogue, Dr. J. Argon, emphasizes the gravity of the account that follows, introducing the theme of Destruction Resulting from Human Greed by focusing on the clash between humans and fairies. This serves to build tension for readers as the novel opens, preparing them to enter the narrative and meet the mysterious anti-hero Artemis Fowl.
Artemis’s encounter with Nguyen in Ho Chi Minh quickly proves how intelligent Artemis is; his conversation with the healer contributes to his characterization by showing that he is also ruthless, only sparing the woman’s life because “[a] corpse is evidence” (16). This section also emphasizes the Book and establishes a foundation for its significance in the novel, as it lays the ground rules for fairies’ behavior, rules that Artemis intends to and will exploit.
With Artemis’s belief that each individual fairy has their own cache of gold, the author includes the first allusion to Irish myths and legends that appears in the novel. The fact that Artemis believes in this tale of leprechauns reminds readers that he is still a child (and someone young enough to believe in magic) who serves as the leader of the household.
Chapter 2 introduces the theme of Caring for One’s Family and People by explaining why Artemis crafted his plan to steal gold from the fairies. It is not purely out of greed but also out of pride: Artemis feels an obligation to restore his family to the financial status it enjoyed before his father disappearance. In terms of plot logistics, the lack of parental involvement in Artemis’s life allows him to operate largely independently; although Butler serves as a father figure, he also obeys Artemis’s every wish almost without question. Artemis’s decision to turn off all monitors in the study is also significant for the internal conflict it introduces. At times, Artemis will be more focused on the task at hand (stealing gold), but during others, he will feel guilty for not prioritizing his father, showing that he is pulled between greed and his family.
Additionally, the first section keeps magic separate from science, paving the way for later development of the theme of The Blending of Science and Magic. Eventually, even Artemis will come to see the need for magic; in the meantime, he works to translate the Book without having magic of his own, proving his persistence even at 12. The task of translating the Book, the narrator says, is one a “normal child would have abandoned” and “[t]he average adult would probably have been reduced to slapping the keyboard” (25). With his handy translator tool, a symbol of his reliance on science, he succeeds. Artemis refuses to let his intelligence lose, no matter what.
By Eoin Colfer
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