Alex Rider: "Never Say Die" Review

“Never Say Die” is the tenth adventure of Alex Rider, and the first since author Anthony Horowitz decided to end the series with “Scorpia Rising” in 2011. It’s fairly unusual for a YA fiction protagonist to come back after the author has decided to write their final adventure and, six years on from what is now no longer the last Alex book ever, this was a faintly surreal read (especially given I was still in higher education when the last one came out). I enjoyed it overall… but there’s one big problem with it.

The story itself is standard Alex fare, which isn’t a negative so much – it makes it a comforting read, and reminds me very well just why I loved these books so much growing up. “Standard Alex fare” is good, well-written, high-paced stuff. There’s the occasional sense of the nostalgia button being hit with the return of characters from the series’ earliest books, but they don’t feel like they’re getting in the way of anything; indeed, there’s one or two notable absences, characters who had appeared in every book until now.

This, however, does bring us onto the big problem with the book. It starts three weeks after “Scorpia Rising” – indeed, some plot elements in this book were now retroactively seeded there – and proceeds to undo nearly every major development that book made. Yes, even that one. If Horowitz wanted to set things up for more Alex after this one, then fine (and he obviously is, given that the book ends with a rather unusual (for this series) sequel hook) – but especially in the last few chapters, it feels like the entire thing is moving backwards for the sake of that, rather than taking Alex into new territory, either here or in future volumes. It doesn’t help that one of the ways it has to move to stop “Scorpia Rising” from being the series’ originally intended grand finale feels like it sells out one of the main characters.

(Surprisingly enough, ‘that one’, as alluded to above, I don’t have much of a problem with being undone… or, at least, in the way Horowitz rationalises its undoing. On paper it’d be easy to get it wrong, but he manages to make it work, and it helps that so much of the book hinges on it. You’ve probably all guessed what it is by now, haven’t you?)

When the book isn’t concerned with this, it’s excellent. But the denouement, and the very last chapter, both get bogged down in it a little too much; the villains feel slightly like an afterthought at times, because whenever they’re present a lot of the time the book is more concerned with ‘that one’. One thing I do really like is that Horowitz hasn’t felt the need to one-up the scale of the plot from book to book, and this is in fact arguably the smallest-scale story in the series yet, which conversely I think really helps with the personal nature of Alex’s mission. As mentioned above, the book also links into its no-longer-last-ever predecessor a few times, which does help with a few of the hoops it has to jump through on that count.

So, then, I’m left trying to find a way that sums up how I feel about “Never Say Die”. I think that by itself, I really like it, and it’s a worthy addition to the series. When I look at the series as a whole, though, I feel it upsets the balance. By the end of the book, the series setup is in exactly the same position as it was before “Scorpia Rising”, and that doesn’t really work for me. (In the early chapters the book feels like it is taking the series to new places, too, which only makes the conclusion even more frustrating.) It feels in places like Horowitz approached the book with ‘How am I going to get out of the fact that the last one was meant to be the last ever?’ and occasionally scrambling to come up with answers, and it also feels in places like things are growing organically from the end of “Scorpia Rising”… and I’d have preferred more of the latter. I thought “Scorpia Rising” worked really well as the last ever book, but in theory I had no problem with Horowitz deciding to write more whatsoever... so long as he could justify why they were more adventures to be had for Alex after that one. And on that front the book's a little patchy, especially in its seeming insistence to bring the series to exactly the same state it was in two books ago. By the end, Alex's new circumstances from the beginning have been entirely forgotten without so much as a mention.

I think it’s still a really good book, in a really good series, and I’d recommend anybody who fondly remembers the books from their childhood pick it up. (I've tried to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible, but as the train features prominently on the cover it's safe to say that the action sequences involving that particular locomotive are fantastic; Horowitz's thorough research shines through as ever.) There are just a few problems that stop it from feeling like it’s entirely part of the rest of the run.