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thekarpuk 's review for:
Kingsman: The Secret Service
by Mark Millar
It occurs to me that this is the second book about a school for secret operatives that I've read recently. The other was Deadly Class, and I would say this book suffers somewhat from comparison.
What's neat about fictional specialized private school stories is that it's basically a way to do complex interpersonal politics stories with more tension, since teens naturally bring overheated emotions and hormones into the mix. Imagine how nuts Game of Thrones or Dune would be with nothing but frustrated teenagers.
And Kingsman largely wastes this potential. We get the setup, with a street thug who's a diamond in the rough getting a shot at spy school, but it seems like Millar gets bored with this fairly quickly. Instead, it becomes James Bond Jr., with the protagonist following his uncle into a evil scheme that seems a bit to nerdy for me to take seriously.
For someone who delights in transgressive touches, I find it interesting that he actually seems to have somewhat of a conservative bend in his writing. There's a suggestion of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps here, which I've always found to be a very apt phrase, since you can not easily use your own body, especially the part of yourself closest to the ground, to hoist yourself up. It's almost like Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the water by his ponytail.
Millar stories seem to come in varying levels of poignant, and Kingsman definitely falls more into the screwing around end of his spectrum. While it was entertaining, a focus on the school struggles would have held my interest better than a fairly tossed-off mission to defeat a zany millionaire.
What's neat about fictional specialized private school stories is that it's basically a way to do complex interpersonal politics stories with more tension, since teens naturally bring overheated emotions and hormones into the mix. Imagine how nuts Game of Thrones or Dune would be with nothing but frustrated teenagers.
And Kingsman largely wastes this potential. We get the setup, with a street thug who's a diamond in the rough getting a shot at spy school, but it seems like Millar gets bored with this fairly quickly. Instead, it becomes James Bond Jr., with the protagonist following his uncle into a evil scheme that seems a bit to nerdy for me to take seriously.
For someone who delights in transgressive touches, I find it interesting that he actually seems to have somewhat of a conservative bend in his writing. There's a suggestion of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps here, which I've always found to be a very apt phrase, since you can not easily use your own body, especially the part of yourself closest to the ground, to hoist yourself up. It's almost like Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the water by his ponytail.
Millar stories seem to come in varying levels of poignant, and Kingsman definitely falls more into the screwing around end of his spectrum. While it was entertaining, a focus on the school struggles would have held my interest better than a fairly tossed-off mission to defeat a zany millionaire.