Customer Reviews

Iron Man: Femmes Fatales (Iron Man (Del Rey))

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you liked Iron Man, the movie, you'll like the novel Femmes Fatales by Robert Greenberger. It occupies a similar territory with its narrative and inside the head of Stark Industries and Tony Stark himself.

Iron Man was, as a comic book character, never terribly exciting to me. But the life given by Robert Downey Jr's portrayal is staggering. A man inside a suit is, after all, something any of us can begin to imagine.

Stark - with his magnetised chest-plate has an Achilles heart and an Achilles heel - his eye for the ladies. They don't work well together. This novel is all about his vulnerability to that and it weaves in a modern terrorist narrative that is very much the rage given world events. It works well, as does the shared billing for Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. This organisation is credibly drawn given its under-staffing and bureaucracy.

What does not work so well is the HYDRA organisation. Although the details are handled well, the motivation, structure and management all seem unbelievable. But it is fiction, and it's not putting in for the Nobel Prize for Literature, so we can let that ride this time.

Greenberger keeps it skimming along well, balancing action and character development, combining the ingredients that made the movie work so well and not insulting your intelligence. It is a promising start if there are more of these to come.

This book was interesting and a nice read. My favorite character was Madame Masque (who doesnt use sex as a weapon, unlike what a review said). She is very smart and intriguing.

A short, but sweet review:

I might have been expecting too much, but this Iron Man novel did NOT have:

1. Strong characterization, only pedestrian ones
2. Much mention of Tony Stark's super technology
3. Fights with Super-Villains, only several fights with Hydra lackeys
4. An awesome climax; it was ho-hum and dangling....

There was way too much redundant focus on the 2 female villains.

I was rooting hard for this one, especially with Robert Greenberger's comics background....but perhaps next time.

Greenberger gives us a nice story from the fledgeling days of SHIELD's formation. Iron Man is known by the public at large to be Tony Stark. Thus, the setting of this book is somewhat nebulous, as the technology and idiomatic references place it as relatively modern, while the comics had the formation of SHIELD decades earlier. (This is explained for the most part on a page at the end of the book.)

The villains of the book are the two Madames, Madame HYDRA and Madame Masque. Madame Masque is trying to rob Stark Industries blind using disguise and her feminine wiles, while Madame HYDRA seeks to destroy the newborn SHIELD using attacks on them and various military suppliers (including Stark) and trying to undermine Stark by seducing him.

The action is nicely written, with enough fight scenes to placate those whose interest is only combat. As the story progresses, the HYDRA agents begin to deploy more and better weapons against Iron Man, showing their tactical acumen and ability to learn from prior losses. Often, though, Iron Man is forced to ignore the real threats to save innocents at risk thanks to diversionary tactics of HYDRA.

Lacking, though, is any real development of characters. They are not much changed, if at all, by the end of the book. Since the storyline here will not impact the comics or the movies, one wonders why nothing noteworthy happens to flesh out the characters for any subsequent books; at least make a good product on its own, right? Also, there are some inconsistencies and errors in the colloquialisms and details. For instance, at one point Iron Man s climbing into the back seat and thinks to be careful because the weight of the suit bottoms out the shocks, but Tony Stark, when carrying the exact same suit of armor (and thus the same weight) in his briefcase, takes no such precaution. Another mistake is when Tony Stark thinks that if someone were to presume upon him they would "have another think coming" when the phrase is "another thing coming". Tony Stark, as a supposed genius, would know the correct phrasing, would he not?

However, the book is an OK read, nothing difficult or insulting in it. Characterizations are pretty complete, based as they are on decades of comics, though as noted there are no round characters when one gets to the end. While in that respect it's much like a comic, a medium in which decades serve to develop characters, in a 300 page book readers may like a bit more.

lf l did not read , how could l know .