![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
djinn and tonic
Saturday, 10 June 2006 03:45 pmWednesday night's private invigilation netted me a bottle of Thelema chardonnay and the interesting revelation that one of the candidates was, in typically small-town CT fashion, a cousin (or something) of my friend James of dodgy pagan days (hi, James!). In addition, I raided Helen's bookshelves, scoring the three volumes of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy, a recent sort-of-kids' fantasy which I've been meaning to read for ages. Being as I am still recovering from the Marking Marathon From Hell, I've spent the last couple of days reading them.
This damned writer has no idea of the rules. Theoretically, new fantasy writers should burst on the scene in a blaze of new ideas, and then start to slowly ooze on downwards as they run out of inspiration, their execution becomes sloppier, and their editors are less and less able to reign in their rampant egos. Code Yellow: JK Rowling, with increasing loss of narrative control. Code Orange: Terry Goodkind, who apparently shot his editor after his first book and thereafter abandoned all pretense at writing style. Code Red: Anne Rice (say no more) and the horrendous bloated hydra that is Robert Jordan (and I can't say any more on account of how he's used up all the words).
But Jonathan Stroud? I read the first chapter or two and thought, ho-hum, it's imitation Terry Pratchett. Footnotes and all. Rather cute sort of alternative nineteenth-century feel, although with more modern tech; magicians as politicians, which is also cute as it literalises what all magicians do in fantasy anyway, i.e. jockey for power; and some seriously cute treatment of djinn, who are inventively bloody-minded astral entities with an amusingly traditionalist tendency to motley shapes and magical effects. Oh, and a sad, downtrodden main character, magician's apprentice, yadda yadda, seen it all before.
Then the carefully-constructed political underpinnings start to creep up on you. And the poor, idealistic, downtrodden boy gets corners, and edges, and believability. And Bartimaeus, the central djinn character who narrates alternate chapters, grows on you as an incredibly rich character in his own right. And you realise, disbelievingly, that this writer has committed the unbelievable: he's made a shaky start, and then got better, he's learning how to handle his setting and the depth and texture of the world are improving all the time, and holding together quite nicely, thank you, which suggests they were pretty well conceptualised from the beginning.
This is not great fantasy, but it's pretty darned good, and its interest in power, politics and social issues is well-sustained and intelligent. Also, the ending shocks, redeems, resolves, and incidentally reveals why the alternate chapters which are the apprentice wizard's POV are in third person, not first. Sneaky sod.
But I'm not sure how the publishing industry are going to deal with a writer who improves instead of devolving. Sounds dashed revolutionary to me.
This damned writer has no idea of the rules. Theoretically, new fantasy writers should burst on the scene in a blaze of new ideas, and then start to slowly ooze on downwards as they run out of inspiration, their execution becomes sloppier, and their editors are less and less able to reign in their rampant egos. Code Yellow: JK Rowling, with increasing loss of narrative control. Code Orange: Terry Goodkind, who apparently shot his editor after his first book and thereafter abandoned all pretense at writing style. Code Red: Anne Rice (say no more) and the horrendous bloated hydra that is Robert Jordan (and I can't say any more on account of how he's used up all the words).
But Jonathan Stroud? I read the first chapter or two and thought, ho-hum, it's imitation Terry Pratchett. Footnotes and all. Rather cute sort of alternative nineteenth-century feel, although with more modern tech; magicians as politicians, which is also cute as it literalises what all magicians do in fantasy anyway, i.e. jockey for power; and some seriously cute treatment of djinn, who are inventively bloody-minded astral entities with an amusingly traditionalist tendency to motley shapes and magical effects. Oh, and a sad, downtrodden main character, magician's apprentice, yadda yadda, seen it all before.
Then the carefully-constructed political underpinnings start to creep up on you. And the poor, idealistic, downtrodden boy gets corners, and edges, and believability. And Bartimaeus, the central djinn character who narrates alternate chapters, grows on you as an incredibly rich character in his own right. And you realise, disbelievingly, that this writer has committed the unbelievable: he's made a shaky start, and then got better, he's learning how to handle his setting and the depth and texture of the world are improving all the time, and holding together quite nicely, thank you, which suggests they were pretty well conceptualised from the beginning.
This is not great fantasy, but it's pretty darned good, and its interest in power, politics and social issues is well-sustained and intelligent. Also, the ending shocks, redeems, resolves, and incidentally reveals why the alternate chapters which are the apprentice wizard's POV are in third person, not first. Sneaky sod.
But I'm not sure how the publishing industry are going to deal with a writer who improves instead of devolving. Sounds dashed revolutionary to me.
