目录

Overview

Ark Angel is the sixth book in the Alex Rider series written by British author Anthony Horowitz. The novel is a spy thriller which follows the attempt by the title character, Alex Rider, to foil the plot of a Russian billionaire.

The book was released in the United Kingdom on April 1, 2005 and in the United States on April 20, 2006. Initial reviews of the book were positive.

Author

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 guignolhorror 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 Gatheringhas just finished production. And…oh yes…there are more Alex Rider novels in the works. Anthony has also written the Diamond Brothersseries.

Plot

The book opens with Maximilian Webber, a former SAS man, giving a speech about a terrorist organisation known as Force Three. After the speech, he is contacted on his mobile phone by an unknown man who declares him an enemy of Force Three. The phone explodes, killing him.

Meanwhile, Alex Rider is recuperating in hospital after being shot in his previous mission; there he meets Paul Drevin, the son of a Russian billionaire named Nikolei Drevin. One night, four men break into the hospital and attempt to kidnap Paul but Alex manages to overpower them. However, he is captured by Kaspar, the leader, and imprisoned in an abandoned building where the men reveal themselves to be members of Force Three. The men set fire to the building after realising that Alex deliberately foiled their plan to kidnap Paul. Alex manages to escape from the fire by tightrope walking to an adjacent building and returns to the hospital, where he is debriefed by John Crawley, an MI6 agent, and later discharged. Back home, Nikolei Drevin rings Alex and invites him to stay with him for two weeks as thanks for preventing his son from being kidnapped. As Alex’s doctor has recommended that he take a holiday so he can relax and recuperate, he accepts.

Alex meets Drevin and his unpleasant assistant, Tamara Knight, at a hotel where Drevin is holding a press conference about his space project, Ark Angel; it is set to be the first-ever space hotel. Alex is treated well at first by Drevin, but he starts to have suspicions about the man when he realises that Paul just happened to have no guards around on the night Force Three broke in, despite being ‘always a target’. Alex spends time with Paul before stumbling into Drevin’s private study, where he discovers that the man owns the building where Alex was interrogated by Force Three. The following day, Alex participates in a race on Drevin’s private go-kart track; Alex beats Drevin when the man attempts to cheat, revealing his hatred of losing. Later, Alex watches a football match at Stamford Bridge with the home team, Chelsea, up against Drevin's team, which gets defeated. Once more Alex encounters Force Three, who are giving a medal to the footballer who missed the final penalty. Alex is briefly taken by one of the Force Three men but manages to get away. Alex tries to tell Tamara Knight about the footballer, but the latter is killed when the medal, which is made of caesium, catches on fire.

Drevin, Tamara, Alex and Paul fly to New York City, but Alex is apprehended at the airport by an immigration official who claims that his passport is expired. This is quickly exposed as a ruse by the CIA so they can bring Alex to Joe Byrne, the chief of the CIA. Byrne reveals that the CIA have conducted an investigation into Drevin's wealth and discovered that he got his money through contacts in the underworld. Byrne is worried that Drevin will slip away from the CIA's hands, so he assigns Alex to report to him if he sees anything amiss at Flamingo Island, Drevin’s private island from where Ark Angel will be launched. Smithers, the gadget master at MI6, arrives and provides Alex with gadgets.

The next day, Alex and the Drevin family arrive on Flamingo Island. Alex manages to intercept a phone call from Drevin who will be meeting someone the following night. Later, however, Drevin finds out about Alex's identity and decides to have him killed. He sends him to dive into a shipwreck, where a guard locks him in and leaves him to die. Right when Alex is about to run out of air Tamara appears and saves him, revealing that she has been Joe Byrne's inside man all along. The two of them go undercover to investigate Drevin's meeting, and see him meeting with Force Three; however, they are caught when Tamara accidentally sets off an alarm.

Alex is brought to Drevin, who reveals his intention to destroy Ark Angel with a bomb and send its wreckage crashing down on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. As the project has gone over budget and Drevin can no longer finance it, he hopes to claim insurance from the disaster, as well as destroy the CIA's evidence of his illegal business practices. Mr. Payne, the island's head of security, reveals himself to be none other than Kaspar; it also turns out that Force Three are just hired hands to act as scapegoats for Ark Angel’s destruction. Drevin kills all the members of Force Three and takes Alex back to his prison, where he explains Drevin’s plan to an injured Tamara. The next day Alex escapes and meets the CIA team stationed in Barbados, but the rocket with the bomb launches off to Ark Angel. The CIA team storm Flamingo Island and Drevin attempts to shoot Alex in the chaos, but Alex dodges and Paul gets shot instead. Drevin leaves Paul and tries to escape, but his plane crashes, killing him instantly.

As Alex finds out there is no way to stop the bomb from the ground, so he must travel up to Ark Angel to deal with it manually. He encounters Kaspar but manages to overpower him using the effects of zero-gravity, and Kaspar is stabbed by his own knife. Alex then moves the bomb away so that the wreckage left after detonation will simply break up and disintegrate instead of crashing into Washington D.C. Ark Angel explodes and Alex falls back to earth, landing a hundred miles off the coast of Australia.

Reception

Philip Ardagh at The Guardian gave Ark Angel a positive review, stating "It's perfectly pitched at its readership. Ark Angel reads the way a children's thriller should read" and "This is a welcome new addition [to the series]." However, Joe Queenan of The New York Times gave the book a more negative review. Comparing it to Charlie Higson's Blood Fever, the reviewer criticised Ark Angel for having "zero intellectual content", calling Horowitz's prose style "clunky, uninspiring". He also described Alex as "oddly bland" and "humorless".