Jimmy Coates: Revenge

Will Jimmy Coates ever escape the influence of NJ7? Is it credible that the British Secret Services should have such a department? If they are truly ‘inside his head’, why can’t they find him? Nevertheless, he and his friends escape to New York; he has a headache and tries to solve the mystery before we reach page 314. An additional six pages threaten a forthcoming sequel and invite readers to enter Jimmy Coates’ website and ‘download cool wallpaper’.

Jimmy Coates is a boy with a difference. He is only 38% human. It is extremely tempting to suggest that the author has a prose style that admirably matches this character defect. The sound of a dozen bullets is a ‘thud’, his headache is where his ‘ear meets his skull’ and a fall from the claw of a crane high above a city into a skip is like ‘landing on cushions’.

Yes, this is a kind of knowingly comic science fiction combining elements of James Bond, Spiderman and the Terminator, laced with some gratuitous violence and enough conspiracy theories to keep a tabloid newspaper in business for weeks. More seriously, it is marketed as the sort of book to wow reluctant boy readers away from computer games and into the pages of a book. Indeed, another reviewer has praised the author as having a ‘sharp satirical edge that keeps the new generation of boys hooked on books’. I’d concur, only replacing ‘satirical’ with ‘cynical’.