This well-hyped kids’ book was actually better than I expected it to be. I would definitely call it good, though certainly not great, and a long way from the best of its kind. The hook of the story is its irreverent tone, starring and being largely narrated by Bartimaeus, a sarcastic and sharp-tongued Djinni forced by a magical contract to serve a naive young master. It’s a well-written tale and an undeniably good hook, but the book falls just a little short of fulfilling its potential.
The plot is straightforward, ordinary and somewhat unsatisfying. Hung around a typical McGuffin plot, it has three parts – stealing the McGuffin, having it taken back and then interrupting the plan that the McGuffin is instrumental in executing. Very typical stuff, and it’s a little irksome that really, the climax could have happened at just about any point in the book and been more or less exactly the same. Everything leading up to it was just build-up, and despite a tacked-on part about patience, our hero really hadn’t grown or changed in any way by then.
The world Stroud creates is solid, albeit not very imaginative. A steampunk-flavoured modern-day England governed by power-hungry magicians, it has a familiar magic system that’s based on the summoning of djinn and other demons from Middle-Eastern lore (though there’s one cat-and-mouse scene where you really wonder why the ‘cat’ doesn’t just summon some spirits), and the appealing prospect of demons who shape-shift. The introductory quotes will have you expecting a clever satire of Blair’s government, but that really extends no further than a magical parody of CCTV. Our young hero Nathaniel has enough flaws to make him seem human, but remains so oblivious to them that it’s hard to think we’re actually supposed to like him, or care about his fate.
Given that it’s the details that really sell this book, though, I find a few niggling annoyances there. The two separate writing styles, the first-person narrative of Bartimaeus and the third-person story from the point of view of Nathaniel, are unsettled at first. There are glib jokes in Bartimaeus’ style in Nathaniel’s story and the supposedly first-person viewpoint shifts into omniscient mode (how does Bartimaeus know what’s happened when he’s ‘long gone’?), though towards the end it all settles and coheres nicely as Stroud defaults to the typical adventure story this book is at heart. Bartimaeus just isn’t as funny as it seems he should be. Footnotes of course bring Terry Pratchett immediately to mind, and he just doesn’t deliver the same number of laughs with similar material, or make you care as much about his world, his characters or his satirical jabs, such as they are. Tiny slips like saying ‘Djinni’ when he means ‘Djinn’ can pass, but introducing the concept of visible planes by saying that those who operate on more than seven ‘are just showing off’, then later calling an eighth plane merely ‘hypothetical’ rankle. And I want the nitty-gritty. I want to know exactly what this summoning horn is, how it works, what it does, because I’m not sure if it’s just an instrument to bend a creature to a magician’s will, if it actually completes this summoning that needed four people, why it’s significant if it gets broken, etc, but it’s glossed over. And it does annoy me that we were teased with these children of the revolution, these magic-resistant upstarts, but their story is just left for the next book in the series. On the other hand, if they had been some kind of dues ex machina and tied everything up in a neat package, that may have been yet more contemptible. I just wish scenes with them in had seemed more complete, more rounded.
In the end, an enjoyable story and a nice, familiar magical world that ultimately comes across like a second-rate Pratchett, but still entertains. Sequels are not in any way must-reads, but I wouldn’t be averse. Not up there with Pullman, Nicholson, Reeve or even Rowling, but far above Colfer or Nix. About the same as Snicket, I’d say!
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