Sam Downing

I like how so many reviews of The Hobbit include a synopsis of The Hobbit - like, der, it’s about a hobbit. And as if is there is anyone who doesn’t know already it’s about a stumpy fellow named Bilbo Baggins who goes on a quest blah blah magic ring yada yada dwarves and elves flim flam dragon.

The true reason it’s unnecessary to summarise the plot of this film is: there isn’t one. Sure, there’s lots of events. Lots of action. Lots of exposition. But no plot. This stems from splitting up J.R.R. Tolkein‘s slender children’s book in three greedy Hollywood-machine money-over-art films, which means a straightforward storyline about going there and back again doesn’t even get there.

Despite this you will go see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, because you liked The Lord of the Rings. And you will think The Hobbit is… fine. It’s not like this is some impossible-to-endure colossal failure of cinema that will skim off the top of your soul and feed it to wargs or direwolves or whatever. There is plenty of stuff to like. Martin Freeman is charming as Bilbo. I could watch Ian McKellen act out scenes from Gandalf Sits Quietly For Three Hours Without Speaking Or Moving (spoiler alert: this is the plot of the third instalment). Cate Blanchett, why are you so beautiful. The dwarves are well cast – some of them are even nice to look at. (Attractive dwarves! Can you imagine!)

It’s just that The Hobbit is as cynically padded as you think it’s going to be. This is evident from the very first scenes, where Ian Holm reprises his role as Old Bilbo to explain to us that he’s writing down his adventure for his nephew Frodo, and then Frodo actually wanders onscreen all like “Whatcha doin’ there, Uncle Bilbo? It’s me, Elijah Wood, from those LOTR movies! Here I am for a bit!”, and then Bilbo explains that he’s writing down his adventure for Frodo to Frodo, and then they talk about Bilbo’s upcoming 111th birthday party (HEY THAT’S FROM FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING GET IT), and Old Bilbo fusses around some more why is any of this stuff in the movie can the unexpected journey please begin.

The entire movie is like this. (The dwarf musical numbers you might have read about in other reviews aren’t as mortifyingly long as I was dreading, but there are two of them, both within about the first 45 minutes, so.) Like remember, back when Peter Jackson and co. weren’t just pumping out movies just to make money, how they wisely cut that awful Tom Bombadil shit out of FOTR? The Hobbit is like they kept that shit in – then shovelled in some more. Saruman (Christopher Lee) and Galadriel (Blanchett) pop up in Unexpected Journey because, hey, why not? (I get why they added Galadriel, actually. Without her the film would be 100 percent sausage-fest.) Some wizard chum of Gandalf’s called Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) zooms around on his bad-CGI sled pulled by bad-CGI rabbits to warn everyone about Sauron’s comeback. I half-expected Aragorn to saunter onscreen and make some “Darth Vader built C3PO”-type meta-reference – everything else is crammed in there.

All this bloat really steals away any urgency from the story. The dwarves want to reclaim their home mountain cave from some dragon who’s taken it over*, but so what? In two-and-a-half hours they hardly get anywhere on completing their quest. I can’t imagine taking a kid to see this, unless kids’ attention spans are suddenly magically enormously long.

(*Remember how the dwarves were the least glamorous characters in the first LOTR trilogy? Like everyone wanted to be Legolas and no one wanted to be Gimli? Well, The Hobbit is focused almost entirely on Gimlis – 13 of them, few of whom I felt I got much of a sense of – so if you don’t like dwarves, it’s T.S. for you.)

Serious question: I’m pretty sure I’ve heard Jackson say he’s doing an extended DVD cut of this movie. How. This is already an extended cut. Watching an extended-extended cut honestly sounds like a tedious chore – I’d rather they release a contracted DVD cut with all the filler chopped out (it would run for five minutes). I have no idea how he’s going to spin two more movies out of what little plot remains, even with all the Middle-earth backstory tacked on, but I have a feeling it’s going to feel ”thin. Sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

In addition to splitting The Hobbit up into three movies, Jackson filmed it at 48-frames-per-second. As far as I know it’s the first feature that’s been filmed this way. Boy I hope it doesn’t catch on. The very best you can say about the effect of the increased frame rate is that you get used to it, eventually. At first it’s super jarring – because it just doesn’t look like a film. It looks like a video game cutscene, or a cheaply done reenactment from a dodgy pay TV crime doco, or a showroom-floor television with those dreadful motion enhancement settings jacked up to max.

Probably future generations of cinemagoers will look back and laugh at how us primitive 2012 audiences recoiled from The Hobbit‘s boosted frame rate, like we look back and laugh at those bozos who leapt out of the way of projections of trains rushing right at them. Well: cram it, future generations. 24fps looks better. 24fps looks like a movie. 48fps looks… plastic and artificial. The computer effects look like computer effects. The stunning New Zealand landscapes* look like IMAX tourism commercials, and not in a good way. The actors clash with the beautifully painted vistas behind them. You should actually go see The Hobbit at 48fps, just to witness its effect yourself.

(*Hilarious joke: How can you tell The Hobbit is filmed in New Zealand? Because New Zealand will tell you. Again and again.)

The first LOTR films worked so magnificently because it’s so easy to get lost in them and forget you’re watching a movie. The Hobbit never stops reminding you it’s a movie, that it’s padded and bloated and strange-looking, that its Middle-earth is built with green screens and computers. It’s not the epic disaster some critics are making it out to be. There are some good, solid, enjoyable scenes – especially Bilbo’s confrontation with Andy Serkis‘s Gollum (which, of course, goes on twice as long as it needs to). But there’s just not a lot of magic here.

Buried in the acknowledgements in the back of Black Heart is what might be the key to Holly Black‘s success. She writes (slight paraphrasing): “I have to thank my husband, who once again let me read the whole book to him out loud.”

That’s right: having a husband is the key to a woman’s success. Just kidding! I mean the bit about reading the whole book out loud. That’s kind of neat, right? The only people who read whole books out loud are the people who get paid to narrate audiobooks. But I think it explains why The Curse Workers trilogy, which concludes with Black Heart (at least I assume it’s a trilogy – trilogies are how YA series are mostly pitched and sold. So maybe there’ll be a fourth book. I have no idea), has such a distinctive, polished, convincing voice. Because Black read the whole book aloud, to someone else. It really pays off.

So. In this series magic is real, and most people with magic powers are criminals – mobsters, con men, killers. Cassel Sharpe is the youngest member of a family of “worker” lowlifes (worker is Black’s term for anyone magic) who’s been roped into using his rare magic ability, the power to transform anything into basically anything else, for the FBI. And of course it turns out the feds are as ruthless and untrustworthy as the worker mafia Cassel is also tied up with. “Between a rock and a hard place” comes somewhere close to describing this kid’s dilemma.

Cassel, bless his melodramatic moody teenage heart, is dealing with some heavy stuff. But The Curse Workers books are not hard hitters. That is not meant as a bad thing! This series is a noir thriller dressed up as young-adult fantasy: it’s sexy. It’s gritty. It’s readable. Please, television executives who are totally likely to pay attention to all the things I say: make a TV series about these books. It’d be Veronica Mars with magic. And I have to wrap this up now because I’m having heart palpitations at how awesome that would be.

Previously: White Cat, Holly Black/Red Glove, Holly Black

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

The best argument against the existence of the supernatural is this: if all that stuff was real, someone would exploit it for profit. (There’s a great xkcd comic about it.) In Holly Black‘s series The Curse Workers, magic is real – and it’s exploited for profit.

Curse workers – those who possess the ability to alter memories, invade dreams, transform one thing into another, or other fantastic powers – rule New Jersey’s organised crime. Think The Sopranos with magic, but instead of a focus on Tony Soprano our hero is Cassel Sharpe, the youngest member of a worker family tangled up with a powerful mob syndicate.

White Cat, the first Curse Workers instalment, detailed Cassel’s discovery of his place within his family and the worker world. It was a great book, honestly, but felt light-weight despite its heavy themes – high on set-up, low on plot. But! All that establishment in White Cat means we know the rules coming into its sequel Red Glove, freeing Black up to get into the meaty stuff. And she gets right to the meaty stuff.

(Some spoilers ahead for White Cat.) (more…)

Remember that feeling after you finished school or university or college or whatever but before you got moved out into the Real Adult World? That feeling of being surrounded by an overwhelming number of opportunities, of being paralysed by the dread of choosing the wrong one, of not really being sure what was going to happen next, of wondering if this is really what life is meant to be like for the rest of forever, of not wanting to move forward but not forward but not wanting to stay? The Magician King is about that feeling. And magic.

(Some spoilers ahead for the prequel, The Magicians.)

Quentin Coldwater is a king of Fillory, the magical land from a series of books he adored as a child, which he discovered was real in the previous instalment. He’s growing fat and comfortable.

But Quentin being Quentin, he’s still unhappy. He wants more, and he gets it when he ventures out on a seemingly straightforward tax-collecting mission in Fillory’s farthest-flung tropical corners: circumstance tosses him and his co-royal Julia – his childhood friend who, you’ll remember, failed the entrance exam to magic academy Brakebills in The Magicians – back into the real world, where they stumble into a quest to save Fillory and magic itself.

The synopsis reads like standard magical-fantasy-land stuff, but Lev Grossman is awesome at blowing up your expectations of those kinds of stories. In Magicians he turned “boy finds out he’s magical, is educated in the ways of magic” tropes on their head. In Magician King he does the same for “boy finds out he must save the world”.

These books also address the realities of fantasy, as dumb as that sounds. If your teenage fantasies came true as an adult, you’d probably be pretty disappointed, as Quentin is. And, like Quentin, you’d soften the blow with layers of hip, disaffected cynicism and knowing pop-culture references. (You wouldn’t see Hermione using as iPhone, as King‘s Australian witch Poppy does)

And this attitude is important because, you know what, fantasy – if taken literally – is kind of lame. (I say that as a fantasy aficionado, FYI.) Grossman recognises this, which stops his work from falling into the twee trap of the classics he’s working with.

Like The Magicians, The Magician King meanders all over the place: Quentin visits Venice and talks to a dragon, then later descends into the underworld. He meets a sloth called Abigail along the way. It’s dreamlike, patched together, and it suits the story wonderfully.

Unlike its predecessor, King is not just about Quentin. Julia’s desperately sad, compelling backstory unfolds in tandem with the A-plot: these flashbacks to her magical education tell a dark, grimly satisfying tale with a devastating kick-in-the-balls climax. Julia’s magic is old and dangerous, nothing like Harry Potter or even grown-up stuff like True Blood: magic is barely under human control, and there are real consequences to using it. It’s fascinating.

I guess with sequels there’s always the question: is The Magician King better than The Magicians? But I don’t think the question even matters here. One is foundation, the other is build. Magicians was startlingly fresh, but Magician King enriches what we already know.

Grossman has confirmed there’s a third book coming (yay!) – he’s created too rich a universe not to explore further, and the end of King leaves Quentin’s story wide open. Like the magic in his books, the potential of Grossman’s fantasy world is near-limitless.

Previously: Book review: The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Magicians is sinister and dangerous and adult, high-stakes and smart and sharp, a fantasy novel about fantasy novels and for those of us who read them, and an exploration what happens when your wildest childhood fantasies are realised in adulthood. (Spoiler alert: it’s never as good as you hoped.) It’s a remarkable book.

Quentin Coldwater is a Brooklyn teenager who grew up obsessed with Fillory and Further – a Narnia-ish series of books written in the ’30s, about a family of English children who escape World War I by nipping out to a parallel world populated by evil witch villains and friendly animal companions. Now preparing for college, Quentin is unenthusiastic about his future despite being a young genius who could do anything he wants.

What Quentin really wants – what a lot of us want, actually – is for the world to be a bigger, more fantastic place than it is. Unlike us readers, though, he’s not constrained by the limitations of reality: his wish comes true when he’s invited to take the entrance examination at Brakebills, an elite college of magic in upstate New York. Unfortunately he’s not accepted, and that’s where the novel ends. Just kidding! He gets in.

Quentin’s education at Brakebills is incredible – its highlight comes when Quentin and his whole class are transfigured into geese and fly all the way to Antarctica for one freezing, rigorous semester. Nevertheless, he’s unsatisfied – the magic world is ultimately as mundane and difficult and disappointing as the real world. The only place he might still discover happiness is in Fillory, which may not be as fictional as he thought. Unfortunately he never gets to Fillory, and the that’s where the novel ends. Just kidding! He finds it.

If you ever dreamed of visiting a fantasy land from a much-loved book, you must must must read The Magicians. It explicitly references a tonne of fantasy novels, especially the Harry Potter series – the simplest way to describe it is “Harry Potter for adults”, or maybe “The Secret History set at Hogwarts”. The magic is mixed in with sex and alcohol and maddening social politics, and a dark streak of danger: in Harry Potter you always kind of knew Harry and Ron and Hermione were shielded from death, but there’s no similar sense here. It’s telling there’s no Dumbledore or Aslan or Gandalf stand-in – Quentin’s teachers are an unsure and wary of magic’s power as he is.

The pace of The Magicians is bloated and messy but its episodic nature suits Grossman’s story (it’s both easy and impossible to see how it might be adapted into a TV series). It’s never obvious where Quentin’s adventures will take him, though in hindsight it all seems inevitable. But it’s often hard to get a fix on the characters – oftentimes Grossman will describe some supporting character as being a certain way, and it’s the first time you got that sense from the character.

I dreamed about this book. The moment I finished it I picked up the recently released sequel, The Magician King. It’s dumb and hackneyed to review a book about magic and call it “enchanting”, but The Magicians really is enchanting.

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.

Young adult meets fantasy meets noir in the captivating novel White Cat from Holly Black, the first entry in her new trilogy The Curse Workers. (Book two, Red Glove, is out in a couple of months. Hurrah!)

Our hero is Cassel Sharpe, though hero isn’t quite the right word: he’s a murderer, who accidentally killed his first love Lila several years ago. Now in his late teens, he’s still so traumatised, so wracked with guilt, that he’s sleepwalking – the very first scene has him waking up on the roof of his school, precariously close to the edge. (Fantastic opening, by the way.)

Cassel has a messed-up family: they’re curse workers, with powers to manipulate people’s emotions, hurt people, erase their memories, influence their luck. That sort of magic is illegal, driving curse-workers underground – making them gangsters, mobsters and con artists. Cassel is the only non-criminal in his family… if you overlook that whole “he killed someone” thing.

The complication: Lila, that someone he killed, was the daughter of a powerful curse-worker boss, forcing his family to cover up the crime.

After Cassel’s disturbing dreams about a white cat get him booted out of school, he starts to suspect his brothers are involved in another massive con – one he’s unknowingly tied up in too.

The noirish details are perfect: Cassel is an alluring antihero (without being a bad boy, that most overdone of YA creatures), clever and introspective without being whiny, and Black slowly draws her oh-so-intriguing story out of the shadows.

But the problem with White Cat is that it feels a lot like the first entry in a trilogy. That’s not to say the story isn’t satisfying, because it is, immensely so, but it feels very… linear. There isn’t a lot going on away from the main plot, and the twists in the story are pretty predictable (though to Black’s credit she reveals them about halfway through and builds on them for the climax; if she’d saved them for the end it would’ve felt pretty limp). I finished the book with a sense of… dissatisfaction, like I only ate half a plate of a mouth-watering meal.

That said, the set-up is so rich that if Red Glove can keep up the atmosphere and suspense of its predecessor, it’s pretty much a surefire winner.

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…)