Rivers of London

I discovered Ben Aaronovich's Rivers of London series on a trawl through the Kindle Store. It wasn't cheap, but the concept looked interesting and... Oh, who am I kidding. Ben Aaronovich wrote Remembrance of the Daleks and Battlefield.

Anyway, I kicked off with Rivers of London, which introduces us to half-Sierra Leonean copper Peter Grant, a man with a scientific mind but a limited patience for the nitty gritty of police work, as compared to his fellow newly-minted PC Leslie May, who is going places. It is through Peter's eyes that we are introduced to a world of magic that exists below the surface of the normal, where a miniscule but dedicated force of civil servants struggles to control an array of ghosts, monsters and gods through a labyrinthine network of vaguely defined 'arrangements'.

Note: there may be spoilers ahead.

I'm interested to know where Ben Aaronovich comes by the knowledge of Black London culture that informs not only PC Grant's background, but also the family of goddesses who represent the lower reaches of the Thames. I confess, white people - especially middle-class white Englishmen like me - writing about anything other than other middle-class white Englishmen always makes me a little uncomfortable, but Aaronovich does it well and has been largely praised for using a black central character, which suggests that he hasn't gone horribly awry, so I can mostly relax and enjoy the rest of the book.

And I did. It's got a wry sense of humour that I like in my fiction (I don't consider stony seriousness a bad thing, but it's not really my thing) and a world that feels real in its scope and incompleteness. In many ways, it is the fact that not everything is explained that makes it work.

Grant's approach to magic is at odds with that of his mentor (the technical term is Master, but as a black man working for a white man, he refuses to use it), Inspector Nightingale, an old school Newtonian wizard whose adherence to tried and trusted forms gives him power that Grant, lax student and experimenter, sacrifices for a flexibility which sometimes pays off. The fact that neither Grant nor May (who starts as an apprentice wizard later and is much better at the correct form) is shown as definitively superior (May, the student, masters the standards better; Grant, the natural, throws out wild cards and tries to look at how and why it works) is another strength. Most books of the sort are yay new thinking, and a few hardline traditionalist, but I like the mix better. Making the male lead the intuitive one is by now almost standard enough a reversal to be its own cliche, but it's done well.

A bold move comes at the end of the first book and is cashed in for the third, as the lead female character's face is transmogrified into the aspect of Mr Punch and then collapses, leaving her unable to speak for most of the second book and hideously disfigured in the third. As well as putting the mockers on your chances of selling the film rights, the complications in the relationship between May and Grant, and the impact on May's character, are played out effectively and convincingly, which is good going for a book that is largely quite lighthearted.

I basically chained through the first three books (the fourth is out in June) and enjoyed all three. It put me in a mood for urban fantasy which was only killed by Kate Griffin's A Madness of Angels, and that only because the woman badly needs to learn to use a semi-colon (not just because everyone should, but because she writes in sentences that just flat out beg to be semi-colonised). I am told that that one is well worth it, however, so will be getting back to it at some point, possibly just before Broken Homes comes out in June.