Could Pittacus Lore's "I Am Number Four" be the next big franchise?

Is Pittacus Lore's "I Am Number Four" the next big franchise?

If you haven't yet heard of I Am Number Four consider this a wake up call because the wheels of the marketing machine are spinning fast and picking up speed. Written by Pittacus Lore (if you can believe it, which you can’t), the novel was published this year by Harper Collins and even before the print was dry it had been snapped up by a film industry eager to find the next big franchise now that the Harry Potter saga is drawing to a close. The novel has more than its fair share of enthusiastic supporters, including director Michael Bay (Transformers) who believes that Number Four is "a hero for our generation", a sentiment shared by The Speculative Scotsman which puts us on notice that "this is the next big thing in genre fiction ... I Am Number Four has zeitgeist written all over it". But it’s The Big Issue which best captures the hopes and aspirations of HarperCollins and DreamWorks when it confidently asserts that the series is "A franchise set to eclipse all memories of Harry Potter and moody vampires... Pittacus Lore is about to become one of the hottest names on the planet".

I must have read a different book.

I Am Number Four is the first in a planned series of six novels which chronicle the life of John Smith, one of nine young fugitives from the planet Lorien which was all but destroyed by a brutal race called the Mogadorians. Fleeing to Earth the fugitives live amongst us in hiding until they develop their Legacies, superpowers to the rest of us, and can then take the fight to the enemy. It’s not known what Legacies a child will develop, but John Smith already harbours remarkable strength and speed, as well as the beginnings of stranger powers, including telekinesis and resistance to fire.

The Mogadorians track the refugees to Earth and hunt them down one by one, but the children have some limited protection in the form of a charm that ensures they can only be killed in sequence, one through nine. One, Two and Three have been eliminated. John Smith is number Four.

John and his guardian, Henri, move from town to town, changing their identity, always ready to leave at the first hint of discovery. Much of the story takes place in the Midwest town of Paradise, Ohio, where John is once again the new kid at the local High School. But things change in Paradise. John’s Legacies are finally developing and he discovers love. And the Mogadorians finally catch up.

DreamWorks seems to be taking a risk with this project, not simply because only one of six novels has been published, but more significantly, the first novel is yet to make an impression on the reading public. For whatever reason, the studio clearly believes that the novel and planned series tick all the boxes on the checklist of Next Big Movie Franchise, or more likely it's counting on the movie generating the necessary interest to drive the series toward Franchise glory. So what exactly does DreamWorks have its hands on? Even though I Am Number Four is marketed as science fiction, the novel is in fact a fantasy about the coming of age of a superhero and it’s probably no coincidence that the adaptation was penned by screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, creators of the Superman origin series, Smallville.

I struggled with the novel. It took me two months to read for review despite the best intentions and several emails of encouragement from the publicist. There’s no doubt that Pittacus Lore can tell a story and the novel clearly has many of the necessary ingredients for a successful franchise, especially one designed for a US audience. Except that it lacks originality, is tediously predictable, frustratingly illogical and annoyingly implausible.

As a Coming of Age High School drama, the story is formulaic to say the least and is dependent on stock characters and situations: the new kid arrives at school and is immediately at odds with the aggressive football jock who is formerly attached to the high school beauty who finds the new boy strangely interesting; conflict between the aggressive football jock and new kid ensues, the new kid triumphs and wins the heart of the school beauty, and new kid and aggressive football jock develop grudging respect for each other. Yawn. I would have offered a spoiler alert but why bother? All the pieces fall neatly into place as we know they will.

The same is true of the Superhero Coming of Age tale: every plot twist is signalled well in advance or is utterly predictable because it’s been done before. By the time we discover that John is developing resistance to fire, we just know that the plot will be contrived to place him in a burning house where he will need to save his girlfriend. Sure enough it happens but the situation lacks drama and excitement and fails to generate any concern for the character because we knew it was coming and know how it will end.

As for annoying implausibilities, consider that John and Henri's survival requires that they keep a low profile and yet Henri is quite happy to send John off to school when the boy's Legacies are starting to develop but are uncontrolled and are manifesting as spontaneously glowing hands.

The only truly original plot device is the charm which protects the nine quite literally until their number is up: they must be killed in sequence so that while Two is alive, for instance, the enemy can’t kill Six. There’s no science to this, it’s magic pure and simple, and in the way os such things no explanation is offered for how the charm is enabled or enforced. Consider for a moment though what power is required to affect the physical world in this way, to prevent an entire species from killing an individual until a certain condition is met. Surely any being with such power could contrive a better form of protection than this. Especially as the charm doesn’t even protect number One as there’s no number Zero which must be killed first. Given this serious oversight, the charm is next to useless as a form of protection: not only is it little more than a death sentence for number One as soon as it is enacted, but because number One is unprotected, number Two is as good as unprotected and so on. In the end, the nine's only real protection is hiding.

But there’s no point dwelling on this flaw. Despite the great significance the charm is said to play in the story it's obvious that the charm is no more than a device to drive the plot forward with no serious thought behind it: One is killed, then Two, then Three, oh dear, it’s Number Four’s turn. In the end it's a flaw in the writing.

When all is said and done the novel is not unreadable, but its appeal must surely be limited to young readers who have not read widely and for whom this unoriginal and uninspired fiction might feel fresh. It's for that reason that I doubt this franchise will have anything like the universal appeal of Harry Potter.

In the end, the most interesting aspect to all of this for me is the authorship. Even before reading the novel and learning that Pittacus Lore is Lorien's greatest Elder, it's fairly obvious that the unusual name is a pseudonym. In fact it's the nom de plume for two collaborating authors, newcomer Jobie Hughes and James Fey, writer of the notorious fake memoire A Million Little Pieces in which Fey chronicled his days as an alcoholic, drug addicted criminal. Oprah famously lauded the work until it was revealed that it was more fiction than fact, at which point the media turned on Fey. As a writer and promoter of his fiction Fey clearly plays a game with the complex relationship between truth and fiction. In adopting the name Pittacus Lore, a fictional character in the novel, Fey plays a similar game to the one he played with A Million Little Pieces and it’s a neat trick that provides an illusion of truth to a fictional story. Unfortunately Fey seems only to specialise in illusion with his fiction - the illusion of truth, the illusion of novelty - and unfortunately illusions don't satisfy any but the least demanding audience.

The big screen adaptation of I Am Number Four is directed by D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye) and stars Alex Pettyfer, Timothy Olyphant, Teresa Palmer and Kevin Durand and has the enthusiastic backing of Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg who are producing the film for DreamWorks Pictures. A February 18, 2011 release date is scheduled. Who knows, maybe as a big screen adaptation it will more successfully entertain?