Contemporary fantasy, sixth in the series. Peter Grant, Metropolitan
Police constable and magician, is back in London, starting with a
magic-related drug overdose and following clues to the Big Bad.
Well, it's a lot better than Foxglove Summer. But it's very
firmly another middle volume, in that modern series style: we want you
to read the series in order, so there is mention of the Big Plot, but
when the Big Plot is over the series will be over, so what we have
left of it gets more and more thinly spread as the number of books
increases. The progress here could be summed up in two clauses, and
you can say "oh, if only X hadn't happened I could have caught him" as
much as you like; the vaguely alert reader knows perfectly well that
catching him was never on the cards.
Another problem is that here in book six there are now quite a lot of
amazingly powerful magical entities in this world, and it becomes
increasingly clear that their powers are limited not by any actual
in-world limitations but by what the plot needs them not to be able to
do at the time. The bones of artifice are showing very plainly through
the flesh of snappy conversation and people being cool.
Aaronovitch continues to take casual swipes at anything "posh", always
going for the easy option ("they don't like the things we like, get
'em") rather than ever considering any actual problems of power and
who wields it on behalf of whom. (Hint, Peter: you're a policeman. Who
decides how much money the police get? What are their priorities for
what the police should do?) And while he's proud enough of his
research to point out at the end that The Jeremy Kyle Show was no
longer on air at the relevant date but he couldn't resist using it
anyway, he has a school for girls called just "St Paul's" (which is
used informally, but because there's a closely related school for boys
nearby, it's "St Paul's Girls' School" in any sort of formal context),
which has boarders (with "dorm rooms") – which the real one has never
done. Even though he's got the correct term "Paulinas" for its pupils.
Presumably he used a real school because after the collapse in quality
of recent books he was trying to get back to the real London geography
that worked so well in the first book in particular, but frankly a
made-up school would have been less distracting.
I can't help noticing that while Grant still mentions people as
"white" when they are (because he isn't) he never describes any other
ethnicity.
But the basic problem here is that this all feels facile. We need
these cool scenes, so we'll make up those bits of connective
tissue to get us there. Here's a dribble of ongoing characterisation
for the series reader, there's the teaser to remind us that there'll
be another book, but while the prose isn't distractingly hard to read
my attention was never grabbed by it. So my disbelief was never
suspended, and so in turn I noticed things like the errors surrounding
SPGS, or "I could smell old petrol and fresh carbon monoxide" (hint:
one of those things does not have a smell, and while Peter might be
speaking casually he's also trying to update magic for the modern era
so it's exactly the sort of thing he'd need to be aware of).
Eh. Many people love this book, and this series. Cool people doing
cool things and having cool conversations: what's not to like?
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