目录

Overview

Point Blanc is the second book in the Alex Rider series, written by British author Anthony Horowitz. The book was released in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2001 and in North America on April 15, 2002, under the alternate title Point Blank.

In 2003, the novel was listed on the BBC's survey The Big Read. In 2007, it was adapted into a graphic novel, written by Antony Johnston, and illustrated by Kanako Damerum and Yuzuru Takasaki.

Summary

The book opens with the death of American electronics billionaire Michael J. Roscoe in an elevator shaft, a friend of Blunt's from the University of Cambridge, in his New York City offices, arranged by a reputable contract killer known only as The Gentleman. In London, Alex Rider ends up in trouble with the police for causing a large amount of damage to a new conference centre while trying to expose a school drug dealer. In exchange for any potential charges being dropped, Alex is assigned by MI6 to investigate the motive behind the mysterious deaths of Roscoe and another billionaire, former KGBagent and head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, General Viktor Ivanov, who died when his motorboat exploded on the Black Sea. The only apparent connection between the two men is that they both had a son attending Point Blanc, an academy for the problem sons of billionaires in the French Alps run by a South Africanscientist, Dr. Hugo Grief.

Alex then goes undercover as Alex Friend, supposedly the rebellious son of a supermarket magnate, Sir David Friend, and he spends a week with the Friend's family. However, during his stay with the family, he receives a hard time from David's daughter Fiona. After his stay with the family, Grief's assistant Mrs. Stellenbosch, arrives at the Friend's house by helicopter. Meanwhile, Smithers meets with Alex, undercover as a farmer, and provides him with some equipment and gadgets (including an explosive ear stud, a bulletproof ski suit, infrared ski goggles, a Sony Discman equipped with a diamond-edged buzzsaw (the blade disguised as a Beethoven CD) and an inbuilt SOS signal, and a hardback Harry Potter book with a tranquilizer dart concealed in the spine). Alex is taken to a hotel in Paris when the helicopter stops for a fuel, and his dinner drink is drugged. When he passes out in his hotel room, he is then transported to a laboratory where Mrs. Stellenbosch and Dr Walter Baxter have Alex examined.

Upon arriving at Point Blanc, Alex meets the founder and director, Dr Grief, and later a German student who goes by the name of James Sprintz, as well as a group of five other boys he gets to know through the week. James confides with Alex that he thinks something is wrong with the academy, because the other boys were rebellious before and then suddenly became complaisant at some point. James also plans to escape the academy, using skis and then going back to either his parents or his friends. One night, Alex saw a boy being forcibly dragged downstairs and thinks it is James, but later sees James uninjured in his bedroom. The following day at breakfast, James' attitude towards his plan to escape seems to have changed, and Alex realizes he has become exactly like the other students. Alex climbs a chimney to examine the forbidden third and fourth floors. He discovers that the third and fourth floors are largely accurate replicas of the first and second floors respectively (for instance, replicas of the boys' rooms, with TV screens monitoring their behavior downstairs), and sees Baxter being shot by Grief when Baxter requests more money, while at the same time saw photographs of himself being examined. Alex signals MI6 using the CD device provided to him by Smithers. This signal is received by the MI6 office, where Alan Blunt and Mrs. Jones debate whether to move in on the academy immediately. Blunt decides to prepare an SAS unit on standby, and take action after 24 hours.

Upon further investigation the next day, Alex finds some boys locked in a basement jail, including Tom, General Ivanov's son Dimitry, James and the son of Michael J. Roscoe, Paul. Alex learns that James was indeed dragged downstairs and was replaced by a replica. Alex reveals the truth to James and Paul, his identity and the reason why he was sent to Point Blanc. However, as the cell is bugged, Mrs. Stellenbosch arrives, knocks Alex unconscious, has him handcuffed to a chair, and turns him over to Dr. Grief, who then reveals his plan to take over the world, named "Project Gemini".

Grief and Mrs Stellenbosch are both revealed to be supporters of the apartheid regimeand former agents of the South African Bureau of State Security. Believing that the black population would not be able to run South Africa and seeing the rest of the world are against the regime, Grief thinks he would be better suited to rule the entire world, and he cloned sixteen copies of himself during the 1980s using stolen money from the South African government. Grief pays a plastic surgeon Dr. Baxter to surgically alters Grief's 14-year-old clones to resemble the boys in the academy. The clones will later take the positions of the boys without their parents noticing. Dr. Grief and his clones will take their assets and eventually rule the world, taking over every field of human life when their time comes. The parents Roscoe and Ivanov were both killed because they became suspicious of their "sons'" behaviour. Grief imprisons Alex, planning to dissect him alive the next day for a biology class but Alex manages to escape. He improvises a snowboard (using an ironing-board) to escape from the academy, but Grief sends his guards to take him down. However, Alex manages to outwit the snowmobiles, and almost makes it to the bottom of the mountain but a machine gunner was there waiting for him. Just as the man is about to fire, a train approaches in the way. Alex jumps on top of it to evade the shots but loses his balance, falls and passes out.

Alex is taken to a hospital in Grenoble, where a visiting Mrs Stellenbosch is told that Alex has died. However, it is revealed that Alex is alive to throw the academy off-guard, and MI6 then sends him out again with a team of SAS soldiers (among them is Wolf, an SAS soldier introduced in Stormbreaker, acting as leader) to help liberate the school. In the school, the SAS team takes out several guards and goes down to the basement to save the imprisoned boys. An ongoing fire-fight ensues as the team encounters more guards. Wolf demands that Alex stays back, who later sees Dr Grief attempting to escape in a helicopter. However, Mrs Stellenbosch appears, surprised and disappointed that Alex is still alive, and fights with Alex. Mrs Stellenbosch proves impervious to Alex's attempts to subdue her (as she was a weightlifting champion) and knocks him down. Just as she points her gun at Alex, Wolf appears. Wolf is shot by Mrs Stellenbosch but manages to shoot the woman himself with his machine gun, sending her crashing through a window. Alex prevents Dr. Grief escaping by driving a snowmobile up a ski jump and sending it on a collision course with Grief's helicopter, jumping off at the last second as it obliterates the doctor in a fiery explosion.

Alex is debriefed by MI6 and Mrs Jones tells him that "all fifteen" clones have been arrested. Alex later goes to the headmaster's office at school home after Jack Starbright informs him that his school headteacher wanted to see him. Alex is startled to find the sixteenth clone, who resembles Alex and had escaped from the academy, in the office. The clone tries to shoot Alex in revenge for Grief's death, causing a fire in a laboratory when he ruptures a Bunsen burner with a bullet. Alex runs up to the roof, to be followed by the clone, and the two fight ending with one of them falling into a hole in the roof following an explosion.

Autho

Anthony Horowitz's life might have been copied from the pages of Charles Dickens or the Brothers Grimm. Born in 1956 in Stanmore, Middlesex, to a family of wealth and status, Anthony was raised by nannies, surrounded by servants and chauffeurs. His father, a wealthy businessman, was, says Mr. Horowitz, "a fixer for Harold Wilson." What that means exactly is unclear — "My father was a very secretive man," he says— so an aura of suspicion and mystery surrounds both the word and the man. As unlikely as it might seem, Anthony's father, threatened with bankruptcy, withdrew all of his money from Swiss bank accounts in Zurich and deposited it in another account under a false name and then promptly died. His mother searched unsuccessfully for years in attempt to find the money, but it was never found. That too shaped Anthony's view of things. Today he says, "I think the only thing to do with money is spend it." His mother, whom he adored, eccentrically gave him a human skull for his 13th birthday. His grandmother, another Dickensian character, was mean-spirited and malevolent, a destructive force in his life. She was, he says, "a truly evil person", his first and worst arch villain. "My sister and I danced on her grave when she died," he now recalls.

A miserably unhappy and overweight child, Anthony had nowhere to turn for solace. "Family meals," he recalls, "had calories running into the thousands…. I was an astoundingly large, round child…." At the age of eight he was sent off to boarding school, a standard practice of the times and class in which he was raised. While being away from home came as an enormous relief, the school itself, Orley Farm, was a grand guignol horror with a headmaster who flogged the boys till they bled. "Once the headmaster told me to stand up in assembly and in front of the whole school said, 'This boy is so stupid he will not be coming to Christmas games tomorrow.' I have never totally recovered." To relieve his misery and that of the other boys, he not unsurprisingly made up tales of astounding revenge and retribution.

So how did an unhappy boy, from a privileged background, metamorphose into the creator of Alex Rider, fourteen-year-old spy for Britain's MI6? Although his childhood permanently damaged him, it also gave him a gift — it provided him with rich source material for his writing career. He found solace in boyhood in the escapism of the James Bond films, he says. He claims that his two sons now watch the James Bond films with the same tremendous enjoyment he did at their age. Bond's glamour translates perfectly to the 14-year-old psyche, the author says. "Bond had his cocktails, the car and the clothes. Kids are just as picky. It's got to be the right Nike trainers (sneakers), the right skateboard. And I genuinely think that 14-year-olds are the coolest people on the planet. It's this wonderful, golden age, just on the cusp of manhood when everything seems possible."

Alex Rider is unwillingly recruited at the age of fourteen to spy for the British secret service, MI6. Forced into situations that most average adults would find terrifying and probably fatal, young Alex rarely loses his cool although at times he doubts his own courage. Using his intelligence and creativity, and aided by non-lethal gadgets dreamed up by MI6's delightfully eccentric, overweight and disheveled Smithers, Alex is able to extricate himself from situations when all seems completely lost. What is perhaps more terrifying than the deeply dangerous missions he finds himself engaged in, is the attitude of his handlers at MI6, who view the boy as nothing more than an expendable asset.

The highly successful Alex Rider novels include Stormbreaker, Point Blank, Skeleton Key, and the recent Eagle Strike.

Anthony Horowitz is perhaps the busiest writer in England. He has been writing since the age of eight, and professionally since the age of twenty. He writes in a comfortable shed in his garden for up to ten hours per day. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he has also written episodes of several popular TV crime series, including Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. He has written a television series Foyle's War, which recently aired in the United States, and he has written the libretto of a Broadway musical adapted from Dr. Seuss's book, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. His film script The Gathering has just finished production. And…oh yes…there are more Alex Rider novels in the works. Anthony has also written the Diamond Brothers series.

Critical reception

Reviewer Chris High said, "For first class spills, thrills, and adventure, Anthony Horowitz can be safely said to have cornered the modern market...influenced greatly by Ian Fleming's work." Read Hot calls it a "must read for all teenagers". The School Library Journal says, "Spy gadgets, chase scenes, mysteries, and a cliff-hanger ending will keep even reluctant readers interested in the second novel in this series." Booklist also says that Point Blanc is a great read for any reluctant teenager ready for a thrilling spy adventure.

Awards

Shortlisted for the 2002 Children’s Book Award.

Winner of the 2004 Children's Book Awards.

名人推荐

From Publishers Weekly
Powerful, privileged and screwed up, 16 boys in a boarding school suddenly turn into model students. It's up to 14-year-old Alex Rider to find out why and to face the maniacal man who has engineered it all in a bid to take over the world in Point Blank: An Alexander Rider Adventure by Anthony Horowitz, the follow-up to last year's Stormbreaker.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Gr. 6-10. There are times when a grade-B adventure is just the ticket for a bored teenager--especially if it offers plenty of slam-bang action, spying, and high-tech gadgets. Point Blank, the second in the Alex Rider Adventure series, is a nonstop thriller of just that sort, which features a 14-year-old orphan who is a reluctant spy for the British government. Trained by his uncle, a topnotch spy who died with his boots on, Alex is a bright, tough, daredevil athlete. No wonder M16 wants him to investigate a mysterious Swiss school dedicated to "reforming" delinquent sons of wealthy industrialists and important officials. Using a false identity, Alex enters the school and soon finds himself surrounded by curiously docile students, teachers who support the fascism, and a renegade doctor interested in cloning. With secret rooms, sullen sentries, mysterious disappearances, and wild rides galore, this is a great choice for reluctant readers. Jean Franklin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From School Library Journal
Gr 5-10-After two influential businessmen die in separate freak accidents, MI6, England's spy network, once again calls upon 14-year-old Alex Rider to infiltrate Point Blanc, a private school in the French Alps for out-of-control, wealthy teens. Armed only with his wits and some 007-type devices, he stumbles upon an evil mad scientist's plot to take over the world using clones as replacements for prominent sons. Spy gadgets, chase scenes, mysteries, and a cliff-hanger ending will keep even reluctant readers interested in the second novel in this series. Familiarity with the first novel is not necessary as the plot fills in past information when needed, but many students will want to go back and read Stormbreaker (Philomel, 2001) to see how Alex first became involved with MI6.
Kim Carlson, Monticello High School, IA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.