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

I read The Ruby in the Smoke at Christmas – and immediately regretted not having the rest of the Sally Lockhart Mysteries at hand. (Apparently they’re only available as ebooks in Spanish, and no habla espanol or whatever)  They’re those kinds of books: Once you’re in the universe, you want to stay in it.

The second instalment in the series, The Shadow in the North, picks up Sally’s story several years after the end of Ruby. She’s a successful financial consultant with a taste for mystery, which flares up  when a client of hers loses all of her money to a ruined company whose misfortunes seem to have been predicted by a spiritualist. Dun dun!

Pullman built a sinister, grubby Victorian London in Ruby, and it’s an even darker place in Shadow. There are deaths – of major characters, who you’d expect to survive in any other series because most writers wouldn’t have to balls to kill off them off. The only “safe” character is Sally, and even she’s only safe from death. She’s a plucky, smart, ballsy, admirable heroine, so the risk of her falling victim to some worse-than-death fate that would crush her spirit is a big one.

The third book, The Tiger in the Well, is about such a fate. While the first two books are about Sally rising above the sexist goons of the time, in Tiger those goons are actively seeking to crush her. A powerful and mysterious force conspires to take from Sally everything that she’s built up – her business, her home, her family – but not by killing her. Her shadowy enemy is taking away everything by twisting the law, which didn’t give much of  shit about women back then, especially unmarried ones with children.

There’s an explicit theme of men hoarding power over women and using it to oppress them. “The real Big Bad is institutionalised sexism,” etc etc” Of course not all the penis-havers are nefarious tosspots. The male heroes – Jim, Sally’s closest friend; Fred, her on-off paramour; Daniel, a political journalist she encounters – revel in her strength and the opportunity to share power with her. Shadow and especially Tiger are explicitly feminist books. Their plots are deliberately pulpy, riffing on penny dreadfuls, but the themes of social justice – not just for women, but for immigrants, Jews, the poor – lend their storylines a real heft.

The Tin Princess departs from the first three books (if the differently arranged title didn’t clue you in). For starters, Sally hardly features at all. The focus is on Jim; Adelaide, a street urchin last seen in Ruby; and Becky, who’s recruited as Adelaide’s maid after she suddenly marries the prince of the tiny European kingdom Razkavia and becomes its princess.

The trio sets out for Razkavia, wedged between Germany and what would become the Czech Republic. Political intrigue follows. Scandal follows. Regicide follows. Razkavia is just an important a character as London was in the first three books, and it’s beautifully realised: Pullman’s descriptions of it are so vivid, his history of it so rich, that a couple times I almost looked up “Razkavia” on Wikipedia to double-check it never actually existed. Too bad, then, that this is one of those books let down by its ending: The story is exciting and thrilling until the last couple of chapters, where it all kind of just peters out.

Previously: The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman

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. [↩]