My British Teenage Spy Can Beat Up Your British Teenage Spy!

Reading trashy literature is an interesting experience.  And no, I'm not talking about Twilight.

I'm talking about the CHERUB series, a set of quite horrendousy edited books written by a Brit named Robert Muchamore.  If you've read any of the Alex Rider books, these are that times about twenty; as in, more teenage spies, more shit getting blowed up...and surprisingly, in some cases more depth in both character development and plot.  "But which series is better?", all of you who live in my fantasy world where people actually read my blog are probably asking.  Well, let us compare our young James Bonds-in-training, shall we?  Spot on.

One thing both series have in common is the type of plot.  Both involve plucky young heroes (British, of course...because American spies just go around making poop jokes and crappy 3-D movies, right?  Freaking Robert Rodriguez...) going around doing super-spy type things.  But while Alex Rider generally depends on a vast assortment of tricky gadgets and secret super-spyin' skillz (all of which are used exactly once and then shipped off to the land of bad plot devices), James Choke/Adams (the new CHERUB recruit who changes his name a little ways into the first book for the semi-plausible reason of creating a new identity) has nothing but highly specialized training and his own wits, which just as often screws him over than actually works for him.  Meanwhile, Alex is busy tightrope-walking over a steel wire with a giant tarp flapping from it.  Piece-a-cake.

That's actually one of the main issues with Alex Rider, honestly: every single one of his skills, usually the type that take years of hardcore training to master, was apparently taught to him by his uncle in a thinly veiled attempt to train him as a spy.  When he was eight.  Which really does make me wonder what the scene would've been like if Alex had wanted to be, I don't know...a firefighter or something.  Guess he'd be a very acrobatic fireman.  James, on the other hand, is pretty much your average 12-year-old suburbanite, except his mum's the morbidly obese head of a shoplifting ring, which results in young master James being more loaded than every single one of the Gates kids put together.  Luckily for us, this giant flashing Mary-Sue alert is nullified fairly quickly, and once again James becomes slightly below average save for his talent with numbers.  So in the preliminary battle of who's got the better character, the trash literature comes out on top.

The gap widens when we take character development into consideration (though admittedly, not by much).  Alex Rider is certainly a nice kid with some kick-ass karate moves, but even after seven or eight books he's still pretty much the same kid.  Literally.  The only thing that could even be considered close to character development is when he finds out his dad was supposedly an assassin for a terrorist organization...and that doesn't happen until the fifth book.  Likewise with the supporting cast: the first hint we get that the various MI6 chiefs and agents aren't cardboard placards with voice synthesizers is when Alex catches a glimpse of a photo of one of them with a couple kids.  In the fifth book.  That's it.  We get a great introduction and an awesome idea thrown at us in the first book...and then we get the exact same thing for the next eight.  The only thing that changes are the exotic locales and the exact method that Alex almost (but not quite) gets offed.  It's entertaining, but if it weren't for the dramatically different settings I think I'd have a really tough time remembering when a certain event happened, regardless of how important it was.

Unfortunately, CHERUB isn't a whole lot more creative with its character design.  James and his supporting cast, for the most part, don't go through any soul-searching moment either...but at the same time, you do get to see some subtle changes in personality after certain events.  They're small, but the development is actually happening, and most of the time it's as simple as James screwing up and learning something from it (I mean, he's still an idiot for the most part, but over time he becomes a much more good-natured idiot).

Perhaps the most damning aspect of the Alex Rider books, though, is the complete and utter Mary-Sue that adorns the majority of its pages.  From the beginning, Alex is a pretty face, and once he goes through the tragedy of losing his uncle, it doesn't take long for...nothing to happen.  He's lived with this man his whole life, and yet at the funeral he's more concerned with the weird people with the big black cars he doesn't recognize.  Maybe one of those super-spying exercises was about having no emotions.  That is no way to be like Bond and screw everything with a pulse and a pair of tits, young man.

And then, of course, we have the missions themselves.  In every case, Alex is a bit like Rambo: either those guards are drunk out of their minds, or he is the luckiest bastard to ever walk the earth.  This kid takes down one terrorist organization after another, and escapes with hardly more than bumps and bruises most of the time.  Even that time he got sniped in the chest, he managed to live...and escape a burning building and tightrope-walk across a hundred-foot gap several hundred feet more above the ground.  Also, he never screws up.  Every dangerous situation always has some special talent, gadget, or combination of remarkably quick thinking and damn-fool luck to negate it.  He's like Iron Man, except without the cool suit and the Robert Downey, Jr.  In other words, he's just a magnificently talented douchebag who has a tendency to make things go boom.  Fun to zone out with when it's raining outside, but not too great for water-cooler talks.

But don't think that CHERUB doesn't have its fair share of flaws too.  While it may have better characters and a bit deeper of an overall plot, it more than overshadows its positive qualities with its shoddy presentation.  I don't think I've ever read a published work that more resembled a mediocre fan fiction in appearance than this one (once again, I must emphasize that I have never read Twilight, nor do I ever plan to).  The dialogue is decent (mostly because it's British), but the prose is bland and the diction is ambitiously basic at best.  Not to mention, the entire series suffers under the unsteady hand of perhaps the worst editing job I have ever had the displeasure to come into contact with.  And I'm not talking about a random glitch here and there; I'm talking about word omissions and grammatical errors almost every other page (stuff like putting "too" instead of "to", for God's sake).  I almost feel sorry for Muchamore; he's got a pretty cool idea, but his editing team isn't helping him at all.  Honestly, that's what makes me classify it as trash literature: not so much that it is, but rather that it just looks the part.  I keep telling people that presentation is much more important than content; that's why Alex Rider is insanely popular and CHERUB is a back-of-the-teen-section-of-the-library deal with only six of the ten books even available in the U.S.

I guess that's all for my critique.  Overall, I honestly do like the CHERUB series more despite the incompetence of its publisher.  It's grittier, it's quite a bit deeper, and it's a hell of a lot more British than its more famous competitor.  If you can find it, I'd definitely suggest giving it a once-over, if only for the sake of comparison to what you normally see in Barnes & Noble.  Think of it as international literature study.  Hell, you play that right and that's some extra World Lit credit right there.  You're welcome.