Plugged by Eoin Colfer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Plugged started off so promising, in my opinion, and I wonder if that’s why I’m a bit more let down than I might otherwise have been. I read the sample of the book offered by Barnes and Noble, and when I got to the end of the free part, going ahead with the purchase was a no brainer. I liked the way the main character talked: sarcastic, bitter, old before his time but not so long before that he hadn’t earned his fatigue. I liked the setting: a dive casino in an otherwise affluent New Jersey bedroom community, gritty and dirty a seamy and all those other things so perfect for a crime novel. I liked where the plot was going: used-up ex-army doorman’s one-time fling gets a hole in her head, and he needs to know why. Clichés, all, but this is why we read genre fiction sometimes
But then it got silly. And maybe if I had known it was going to be silly, I would have been ready for it, and accepted it. I like a good farce. But this doesn’t read like satire at all: it reads like someone who read a satire, didn’t realize it was satire, and decided to write something “just as good.” It’s like all of the cliché’s that were acceptable in the first few chapters gave the writer license to keep adding in more and more nonsense. Yes, I said that’s why we read genre fiction, sometimes. But we really are hoping that the writer takes all of those tired old ideas and does something unique with them.
I almost said “unique or clever,” but I think I’m getting a little tired of clever. To his credit, Eoin Colfer maintains all of the tropes from the first few chapters throughout the novel, so it’s still readable. But I feel like “original” was sacrificed for “clever,” and the result may be readable, but hardly memorable.
I know that sometimes writers write just to find out what happens. They’re as much slaves to the plot as the readers are. Maybe Colfer just kept writing himself into corners, so he took the goofy way out. But he’s allegedly an experienced writer—he wrote the Artemis Fowl novels, after all, and was commissioned to write the 6th Hitchhiker’s book. So I don’t know what his excuse is. Maybe it’s all my fault, going in with high expectations. Maybe genre fiction is just genre fiction sometimes. Oh well.