2014 contemporary fantasy, fifth in the series. Peter Grant,
Metropolitan Police constable and magician, goes to Herefordshire to
help the local force with the investigation into the disappearance of
two girls.
Well, it seems that Broken Homes annoyed me more than I thought
it had, because it's nearly five years later that I felt like tackling
this one. And… it left almost no impression.
All right, so we're out of real London and in imaginary places again,
this time a small town near Leominster, so there isn't that detail of
reality that got this series off to such a good start. Does
Aaronovitch need an Iron Age hill fort just here, and a river just
over there? Well, he can put them where they're needed without
having to worry about real geography; but this also means there isn't
the depth of real legend to dive into and reinterpret, just the
pastiche of the invented stuff which so rarely manages to achieve
multiple layers of meaning.
Ongoing situations are put on hold because Peter's away from London.
Obvious new recurring plot elements get introduced, but not much is
done with them and there's no resolution to them. Peter gets laid a
lot. Only one of the series' other recurring characters shows up in
more than a cameo, and the ending's cut short without anything like a
coda.
I think that perhaps the reason this one felt so flat to me is that
its appeal rests on its one big idea, that this is how faerie is
going to work in this universe, and, well, I've been reading
speculative fiction for getting on for fifty years and I'm not really
impressed by big ideas any more unless they're developed, engaged
with, rather than shown off by a cast of ephemeral characters look how
clever we are OK on to the next book.
It's the sort of series book which isn't so much "I need to produce
another of these, do it by rote" but "I have only so much Big Plot to
stretch across the rest of the series and I want to keep writing them
as long as people keep buying them, so I will measure it out in tiny
little drips and spend almost all my time on the immediate story".
Which would be fine if the immediate story were compelling in itself.
I mean, there's so much potential here. Grant is obviously non-white
and he's presented as being the first non-white person many of these
country people have met in person, but there are one or two surprised
comments and that's it, so it never affects the story. There's a lot
of fuss about how he's going to combine his magical investigations
with being a visible officer on loan, but the police know that there's
a magical division and so they let Grant do pretty much whatever he
likes – even though at first he makes a point of getting himself into
a specific slot in the investigation/search operation, which he then
ignores whenever it's convenient. On the other side of the prejudice,
Grant's entirely ready to dismiss things he doesn't understand as
"posh", but since Aaronovitch doesn't notice he's doing it that
doesn't come back to bite him. (Something else Aaronovitch doesn't
seem to notice, and therefore no character does either, is a huge
sexual consent issue, which is treated as funny.)
Oh, and what's going on when, in the context of a failed WWII special
operation, they're talking about gliders being used in the
withdrawal? The glider, she does not work like that.
Eh, lots of people love this one. If you already like the series
probably you will too. For me the enchantment is most definitely
faded.
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