Sam Downing

(Spoilers follow.)

Oh boy this is a stupid book.

I honestly don’t mean “stupid” as an entirely bad thing – I like plenty of things which are “stupid”, and there’s nothing guilty or ironic about my affection for them.  I mean “stupid” as in, Clockwork Princess is unashamedly romantic and melodramatic and hand-wringing and bosom-heaving. And if that’s what you’re reading this series for: fine. You’ll love this final instalment. Everyone’s paired off neatly, more or less, and everyone gets a tidy ending. Hurray.

I guess I’m more about plot than romance, though, and the plot is disappointing. For starters, it’s thin, so thin the novel’s sharp-clavicled cover model would look at it and be like “Seriously, eat a sandwich, plot”. But it seems weightier than it is because half of every page is devoted to characters ruminating on the exact same problems they were ruminating on a chapter ago. (“I love Tessa but Jem loves Tessa, woe!” “I love Sophie but Sophie is a mere servant girl, woe!” “Gideon tricked me into wasting scones, woe!”) There are whole pointless chapters you can just glance over without losing the thread of the story – which is a hallmark of Clare’s work, and not a great one.

It’s the resolution to the plot that’s most disappointing. (Book, I am disappoint.) Clockwork Angel and Clockwork Prince told us that Tessa, our immortal heroine, has mysterious powers unknown even to her, which make her vitally important to the cunning plans of Mortmain, our villain. Well, Mortmain seems to do a pretty good job building an unstoppable army of robots without relying on Tessa, and even after finishing this book I’m still not clear on exactly why he needed her so badly. (Something to do with using Tessa’s shapeshifting ability to make her transform herself into Mortmain’s dead father, so Mortmain can access dear old dad’s memories and make his automatons even more powerful. Or something. Like, is that all.)

And the ending just feels so… easy. Tessa is torn between her love for two best friends, Will (who’s beautiful and arrogant and less of a dick than he seems) and Jem (who’s beautiful and kind and suffering from a fatal illness that will kill him any day now). She ends up with Will, but not because she has to make any sort of sacrifice or choice: Jem – impossibly, implausibly nice Jem- goes and joins an order of immortal monks (… kind of), despite saying early on that he’d never do that, freeing her up to marry Will. Easy. But then, after a century or so, when Will’s long dead, Jem leaves the order and hooks up with Tessa anyway. Even easier! So she ends up with both of them. The cake is both had and eaten.

And Mortmain is defeated pretty easily, because Mortmain is a dull villain who’s evil mostly just because he’s evil (another Clare hallmark), much as Clare tries to flesh him out with a backstory. He exists because someone needs to be working to destroy Tessa and Jem and Will and the rest of their demon-fighting Shadowhunter friends, right?

I kind of feel bad coming down harshly on Clockwork Princess. It is what it is. It’s not terrible. (And it’s a lot better and more inventive than the increasingly over-the-top Mortal Instruments series, which this Infernal Devices series precedes). Other people will read this book for much different reasons than I did. And those people will probably like it a lot better.

Previously: Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare; Clockwork Prince, Cassandra Clare

What a captivating, enthralling, terrific book!  The Ruby in the Smoke is the kind of adventure I’d tentatively describe as “ripping”. (But not if it makes me sound like a dick?) As I read this I crossly thought: “Why wasn’t a book like this around when I was a child?! What a rip!” Later on I discovered it was published in 1986, when I was a (very small, still-several-years-from-learning-to-read) child: “… oh.” At least I got to enjoy it as a manchild an adult.

Here are some things that make Ruby a great book. One: Its heroine, Sally Lockhart, who is clever and resourceful but not easily reducible to adjectives like “plucky” or “feisty”. Two: Its dirty and sinister Victorian London-setting, which is crawling with crims (…? Is that era-appropriate slang? Is “crims” the sort of thing a late-1800s London resident would say?) and opium dealers and other grubby reprobates. Three: Its complicated and cunningly told mystery, which scuttles from the eponymous stolen gem to Indian mutinies to Sally’s dead father to frightening crime matriarch Mrs Holland.

And: It is written by Philip Pullman, who wrote the His Dark Materials trilogy. And basically everyone who’s read those books thinks they’re awesome. (Well unless they’re Catholics or religious-types or whatever I guess.) He cleverly keeps readers guessing about whether the puzzle will have a supernatural resolution or not. Finding out is a lot of fun.

One strike against the series: It isn’t available as e-books. (Well – they’re available as e-books in Spanish. And my Spanish is, how you say, muy inelegante.) Isn’t that annoying.

Afterwards I watched the BBC adaptation which stars Billie Piper as Sally (and Matt Smith as her friend and ally Jim. It was his first TV role! And it’s kind of weird seeing him in this because Jim is only about 13 in the books and Smith was like in his early twenties when this thing was filmed). It’s pretty good! And well cheap on iTunes.

Kraken opens with a pretty epic locked-room mystery: a giant embalmed squid is stolen from the British Museum of Natural History in London. The whole squid, and the tank it’s stored in. Gone.

Museum curator Billy Harrow is sucked, almost against his will, into the ensuing investigation: he’s passed around between a cult-busting police squad, a squid religion, and London’s magical warlords as he starts to realise that the end of the world is coming, and soon… a synopsis that doesn’t do justice to Kraken‘s sheer batshit craziness.

The tone of this book is much loosier and less serious than Mieville’s other works (that I’ve read, anyway). He pretty much throws anything at the wall without waiting to see if it sticks: there’s real working Star Trek phasers, talking malicious tattoos, a union for animal familiars, angelic museum guards, and more, and more, and more. The plot bristles with anarchy and pop-culture references and inventiveness - Ben Aaronovitch’s similarly themed magic-in-London books seem tame by comparison – and the hodge-podge evokes a sense of messy chaos that perfectly fits the pre-apocalyptic tone.

Trouble is, the further into Kraken you get the more exhausting the frantic pace becomes: the finale is an ADHD blur, and there are few characters who really leap off the page. What ultimately stands out about this tale is Mieville’s jaw-droppingly admirable creativity. It’s cliched to ask a writer where he gets his ideas, but seriously – where does this man get his ideas (and can he please mark the exact location on a map to benefit the rest of us)?

Previously: Book review: The City and the City, China Mieville; Book review: Perdido Street Station, China Mieville

Clockwork Prince is Cassandra Clare’s sixth book, on top of a heap of her fan-fiction, so by now we know what kind of writer she is. More importantly, she knows what kind of writer she is, and Prince is laden with her hallmarks: zippy banter; (borderline pretentious, questionably necessary) literary quotes and references adorning every other page; irresistibly beautiful but tortured bad boys to entice the plucky heroines.

It’d be so easy to write Clare’s books off as florid trash – and they are certainly floridly trashy – except there’s something about them that just works. Even when the dialogue sounds more like something from a contemporary teen drama than 19th-century Victorian London, you keep reading. Even when the stakes of the plot seem to have nicked out for a cigarette break (a long one), you keep reading. Even when Clare tosses in yet another ”They almost kissed but something interrupted them”-style, super-melodramatic cliffhanger… yeah.

(Minor spoilers ahead for Clockwork Prince‘s prequel, Clockwork Angel.)

The “clockwork prince” of the title is Mortmain, a shady fellow with ties to London’s Downworlders – Clare’s collective term for vampires, werewolves, warlocks, and other supernatural riff-raff. He had a hand in the mysterious birth of Tessa Grey, who’s grown up to learn she can take on anyone’s physical appearance, though she’s still yet to discover the true origins and nature of her power.

In Angel, Tessa fell in with London’s Shadowhunters, particularly the handsome but emotionally unavailable Will – a character delivered straight from the Cassandra Clare Factory for Devastatingly Handsome But Emotionally Unavailable Male Leads – and his kind-hearted best friend Jem. In Prince, the trio is tasked with uncovering Mortmain’s dastardly master plan, which apparently involves building menacing robots to kill all the Shadowhunters.

The Shadowhunters spend most of their time gossiping about Mortmain, yet strangely, he never appears in the book named after him. It means there’s never any real threat to Clockwork Prince - no jeopardy. Sure, there’s a subplot about mean Shadowhunters wanting to kick Tessa’s allies out of their headquarters. But there’s never any sense that anything bad will actually happen, and the book kind of shuffles to a close without ever really challenging its characters. In the last few pages I expected something shocking to jump out and ruin everything. It doesn’t.

The problem, I guess, is that Prince suffers from classic “middle instalment in a trilogy” syndrome. It’s a bridge between the origin story and the grand finale, without much to prop it up on its own.

But I doubt that will matter much to Clare’s ardent aficionados, who read these books for one thing: sex. And there’s plenty of that. Sexual tension runs high between Tessa, Jem, Will, and all the supporting characters – conveniently, Shadowhunters’ mores are way more relaxed than those of their Victorian peers. There’s love potions and secret weddings and nighttime trysts and more and more and more and more till the book practically throbs in your hands.

It is ridiculous. And yet, I will keep reading.

Previously: Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare

Rory Deveaux has two near-death experiences in about as many months: the first comes when she nearly chokes on dinner soon after quitting her native Louisiana for London – where she enrols at Wexford, a posh boarding school smack in the middle of Jack the Ripper’s old stomping ground.

The location is important, because Rory’s arrival coincides with the start of a series of murders that mirror the Ripper’s infamous, gruesome killings. Is it a copycat at work, or something even more nightmarish?

As Rippermania grips London, Rory encounters a mysterious man who her (adorably English) roommate Jazza can’t see. He’s a ghost, and Rory’s rare ability to see him grants her entry into a team that hunts London’s “shades”… which ultimately leads to her second near-death experience at the climax of the book, as the Ripper’s killings come to a head.

The Name of the Star has some great ingredients: English boarding school hijinks, murders, young people with implausibly awesome jobs with the police. But something about it is all a bit unsatisfying: I wanted the story to be more sinister, more romantic, more London. Johnson only captures flickering senses of the city and the sensational dread of the Ripper’s return, and the plot twists are often contrived; when the villain’s motives were revealed (via monlogue), my reaction was pretty much, “Why would anyone go to all the effort of X just to achieve Y?” And many of the supporting characters fall flat, though others are terrifically vivid – especially Rory’s oft-mentioned, never-seen American relatives.

I really wanted to enjoy this but I just wanted more; it’s less than the sum of its parts. Johnson is a lively, funny writer but The Name of the Star feels like it’s going through the motions of setting up a new supernatural YA series, rather than transporting us to spooky and mysterious London.

Exit Through the Wound is about nothing, and I don’t mean that in the same sense that Keeping up with the Kardashians is about nothing¹. More like it’s about nothing in the same way Seinfeld was: something happens, and maybe it briefly seems important or meaningful, but ultimately the stakes are super-low compared against the scale of the entire world – and that’s the point.

But Seinfeld focused on the amusing quibbles of nihilism, and ignored its dark and depressing side. Exit Through the Wound is consumed by the dark and depressing. It’s a blackly, laugh-out-loud funny book, one of my favourites of the year, I think, but parts of it made me want to stand on the edge of a building and go completely limp in the hope that I’d fall to my death without having to go to the actual effort of jumping off. (This is a very appropriate suicidal response to this book.)

Our hero is Maine Hudson, which is not his real name. Maine was raised in Greece but abandoned his home country and culture for the bleak streets of London,where a business consultancy pays him to email his co-workers and reorganise his desk. On weekends – and most weeknights – he consumes heavy quantities of pharmaceuticals.

Maine is not a likeable character, at least not in the I’d-want-to-spend-much-time-around-him way (which is fine, because if he were real he probably wouldn’t care to hang around himself either): he’s entitled, surly, morose. But jeez, you feel for this guy. His grim resignation to the unfairness of life – not in the sense that it’s unfair people suffer and die, but more how unfair that it’s all so mundane and pointless and godless – is palpable.

If that’s not a feeling you relate to, then: 1) You’re blessed or ignorant or both, and 2) Wound is probably not a book you’ll enjoy much.

The novel unfolds in 40 short chapters – almost like a string of short stories, really, in which Maine blankly endures his existence. Being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or dumped by the love or your life is equally important, or minor, as having a stranger yell at you on the tube.  Like Seinfeld, Maine is obsessed by apparent trivialities, “apparent” because these unimportant moment fill the bulk of our lives, and his observations of society’s absurd characters – office gossips, creepy gym-goers, vapid acquantainces – are sharp and hilarious. (If you too have been forced to attend corporate-style training courses alongside suspiciously enthusiastic personality voids, you will laugh.) The story spans roughly a year, and the first chapter in the book is the last chronologically – so you know from the start Maine won’t ride into the sunset after discovering true happiness. There is no such thing, maybe.

If you’ve followed North Morgan’s blog London Preppy for a while you’ll recognise Wound‘s style (and, like me, you’ll probably hope  that for the sake of Morgan’s physical and mental health the adventures of his fictional alter egos aren’t too autobiographical). And maybe Morgan started out as a blogger who gained a following posting shirtless photos of himself – let’s none of us embarrass ourselves pretending that’s not why we started reading him – but he’s evolved into a powerful writer, one who gets that miserable sense of “So what?” that pervades adulthood, but also the strange detached amusement it can arouse. I am not a heavily sedated, depressive business consultant living in London, but some parts of Maine’s story felt true:

Going to the gym is part of my daily, obsessive routine that creates this wonderful sense of consistency, a consistency that I need to have because I’m so weak that I can’t deal with change. This is unfortunately offset by the parallel feeling that I’m trapped in a recurring nightmare, a lifestyle I never chose and can’t escape.

Right?

1. Like I once watched three minutes of that show and was later diagnosed with bruising on my brain. [↩]

Best thing about reading the second instalment in a series: the origin-story stuff in part one is over and done. Not that origin stories aren’t a fun time, but there’s a formula to setting up characters and plots and tone, and once a series is freed from that formula it can start to shine.

Moon Over Soho, the follow-up to Rivers of London, offers a pretty good indicator that Ben Aaronovitch’s wizard-police-in-London series – I think we’re calling it the Peter Grant series? Which isn’t that catchy  – is starting to shine.

So the story picks up pretty much where Rivers left off: budding policeman/wizard Peter Grant has closed his first supernatural case, and continues his magical education under the tutelage of his Stephen Fry-ish inspector, Nightgale.

Working out of the Folly, the nickname for the posh old building that is the headquarters of London’s magical police, the twosome discover a new mystery: the city’s jazz musicians are dying, the life force sucked right out of them, sparking theories there’s a “jazz vampire” afoot. It’s all as messy and ridiculous and fun as it sounds.

That sense of fun is down to Peter, who’s a fresh, likeable hero: Aaronovitch has created a leading man who doesn’t take his unlikely adventures too seriously, is streetsmart but not wisecracky, capable without being annoyingly perfect, and who actually gets to have some actual sex this time around. (Seriously, this series is ripe for a magicked-up, oversexed True Blood-ish television adaptation. Get on with that, British TV bosses!)

The history of London is woven into the plot of Moon Over Soho more smoothly than in Rivers of London, as Peter dashes around the city meeting new characters, reacquainting himself with old ones, probing the tragic history of English wizardry, and stumbling on to the fringes of a cabal of evil wizards. It’s this kind of world-building that leaves me double-keen to see what magic Aaronovitch will work in the forthcoming third instalment, London Under Ground.

This is going to sound like an insult, but it isn’t: Rivers of London is a mix of the magical and the mundane. But “mundane” here isn’t a bad thing. Think Harry Potter meets The Bill. The end result, with characters throwing spells in one scene then grappling with the modern bureaucratic nightmare of the London police force in the next, is pretty hilarious.

The set-up is pretty standard stuff: Peter Grant is a regular cop who stumbles into a previously undiscovered magical underworld. He’s apprenticed to the mysterious and charming Inspector Nightingale, one of the last of the wizards, who’s formed a complicated working relationship with London’s Bobbys (that’s what English people call police officers, right? Right?).

In between dropping one-liners, Peter gets to work on his first cases: solving a string of deaths caused by a malevolent trickster spirit; and working out a dispute between London’s river spirits. London is, obviously, a big part of the novel, and while it never really achieves “another character” status, the London details threaded through the story add to its charm – Aaronovitch has a clear affection for the city. (Also, kudos to Aaronovitch for attempting to work out the physics behind magic, something many fantasy authors ignore, cough J.K. Rowling cough.)

I do most of my reading on my commute to and from work, and Rivers of London is one of those “Aww, I’m at the office already? I wanna keep reading nooooow“-style books. It’s also the first entry in a series (followed by Moon Over Soho, which I want to read nooooow, and the forthcoming London Under Ground), and it shows. While the A-plot is resolved, most of the lesser-lettered plots are left hanging. Which is a little frustrating, but standard operating procedure nowadays.

PS: In the US this book is called Midnight Riot, and has a cover that cuts back on the whimsy and ramps up the action-packed-ness. Oh, America.

So I haven’t updated my blog in like forever, but, I have a pretty good excuse: I’ve been off travelling around the States, the UK and Europe (mostly Europe) since December. (The trip was awesome, by the way. LONDON I MISS YOU.) It turns out one can get a lot of reading done when one is travelling, so here it is.

(Incidentally, I didn’t lug all these books around with me; I read them on my iPhone using Stanza, which is a brilliant app. And, since I get asked this a lot, reading on the iPhone screen is generally fine – as long as you spend a bit of time working out your preferred font face, size and spacing before you commence the actual reading.) (more…)

I’ve been a reader of Cassandra Clare for a while: in the early ’00s I enjoyed her Harry Potter Draco trilogy (pretty much the only fanfic I’ve ever read, I swear!), I lapped up the Very Secret Diaries like everyone else on the internet, and last year I consumed her The Mortal Instruments trilogy in about a week.

Thus I am qualified to say that Clockwork Angel, the first instalment in The Infernal Devices trilogy, is her best work yet.

So Devices is basically a prequel to Instruments (it’s not necessary to have read Instruments to get Devices, though I’d recommend it), set in a late-19th century London infested with demons and “Downworlders” – Clare’s term for vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beasties. Fortunately regular humans, or “mundanes”, are protected by the Shadowhunters: an elite band of warriors descended from angels (more or less).

Tessa Gray comes to this world from New York City, searching for her missing brother Nate, and soon encounters two teenage Shadowhunters and best friends: the beautiful, arrogant Will (who’s basically the same character as Jace from Mortal Instruments, at least at this stage in the trilogy), and the sensitive, sickly Jem¹ . Naturally a love triangle begins to blossom, as Tessa is pulled into a dangerous mystery building in the Shadowhunter world.

The individual elements of Clare’s works are rarely that original, and that goes for Clockwork Angel – there’s the usual steampunk tropes, familiar demon-hunting tropes, the character-types you’ll find in most YA novels, all wrapped in customary snark – but that isn’t an insult. Clare has a knack for combining stuff we’ve seen into an enjoyable, compelling story.

Clare’s writing adopts a Victorian style which suits her well, but be warned that Angel is very heavily geared towards setting up the next two parts, Clockwork Prince and Clockwork Princess – don’t pick it up yet if you’re the type of reader who interprets “tantalysing clues” as “frustrating loose-ends”.

Fortunately I am not that type of reader. Clockwork Angel is entertaining, dare I say ripping stuff, crammed with invitingly detailed world-building – I even read it during my lunchbreak at work, and let me tell you, I don’t do that for just any book.

1. for the record: Team Jem! Will is the Bad Boy, and I’m not into the Bad Boy. [↩]