2025 modern fantasy. Dr Saffy Walden is Head of Magic at Chetwood, a
long-established public school; most of her time is spent in
administration, but she does teach Invocation to a select group in
their final year. Everyone goes to a lot of trouble to keep the
children safe from demons
So this is that other magical school story from the perspective
of the teachers that I mentioned a few posts ago. And as I said there,
given the option I prefer to read about adults rather than children.
Tesh is a teacher herself, and the school experience rings true. (In
particular, a recurrent theme of "yes, but other than teaching and
secret government work, what is learning magic actually good for?"
seems very likely to have been inspired by Tesh's own field of
classics.)
There are a couple of things that are wrong here, and one that was
just a disappointment: after several early displays of competence,
Saffy makes a series of personal mistakes, and while I can't say these
are out of character for her, they don't seem quite to match what's
gone before, and it wasn't necessarily what I wanted to read. A
saboteur is hinted to be acting on behalf of a shadowy conspiracy, but
that's never followed up. But my large objection was to the strong
suggestion that Walden's solitary lifestyle was entirely a response to
long-ago trauma, and not at all simply a thing that was right for her
personality. Since she's the only person we see being less than
sociable, I got a slight feel of that classic teacher trope that
Everyone Must Join In And Be Happy whether it suits them or not.
But I'm mentioning the objections mostly to get them out of the way,
because I loved this. Nobody here is perfect (though one character
comes close0), almost everyone is trying to do the right thing with
the limited resources they have, and they legitimately disagree on
what "the right thing" might be. The demons, and of course there are
demons, are interestingly different from humans, and are attracted
more than anything else to complex systems: computers, of course, but
also clocks and photocopiers and the entire administrative routine of
a school. How do you ward against that?
Not quite the book I wanted, but one with which in the end I felt very
satisfied. Perhaps, for my taste, not quite up to the excellence
Some Desperate Glory; but it's a couple of years since I read that,
and I usually like books more in retrospect.