My Life in Reviews

So, this page here is a list of the many reviews I wrote for Write Away (now Just Imagine) when I was teaching. I stopped when I stopped teaching; having begun in my first English Lit training class with a copy of Across the Nightingale Floor and another of Shadowmancer, which I never even managed to finish, I think it was too tied up in my mind with being a teacher.

NOTE: Well, apparently Write Away doesn't do reviews anymore, so that link is a dead duck. Ah well; brief was my glory.

A Madness of Angels

In a continuing vein of urban fantasy, I moved on from John Dies at the End to the slightly more accurately named A Madness of Angels. I'd tried it before and been turned off early by some pretty minor grammatical and stylistic flaws, which on a second reading proved quickly to mask a quirky and adept use of narrative voice. In fact, I suspect that part of the problem was that the accidental errors hid the deliberate beats.

Having got over that, I was able to engage with the book on its own terms and discover a really new and exciting vision of an urban-fantastic landscape, where sorcerers draw their power from the tiny magics of everyday life and the turnstyles of the Underground make the finest hermetic pentagram look like a welcome mat; where the quirks, fears and frustrations of everyday living are writ large as the spirits and gods of a new pantheon and the symbolism of the everyday becomes the language of modern magic.

Ultimately, the greatest failing of the book is the protagonist, a first person narrator who manages nonetheless to be a cypher. In part, this is deliberate, he is a mystery even to himself for much of the book, but for me it went further than that and, even as he became more realised, it was hard to connect with him through the layers of magic and weirdness.

This niggle aside, I enjoyed the book very much and shall be reading more of the series... when/if the price for the Kindle editions drops a bit.

Next up, China Mieville's The City and the City.