So, this past month I’ve been reading through the first two Harry Potter books with my daughter(1),
using the large, illustrated editions to keep her from going all pie-eyed at
the walls of text. We’ve started on The
Prisoner of Azkaban, but after that we’re going to need to wait for the
next one to come out next year. She’s not the most focused of listeners, but
she frequently surprises me with her acuity and recall. Of course, we’ve hit a
bit of a complication as her brain smooshes various media – book, film, LEGO
video game – together into a single narrative, but so it goes, and I’m honestly
kind of proud of her ability to zone out Gilderoy Lockhart.
My own reading kicked off this month with The Burning Maze, book three of Rick Riordan’s Trials of Apollo
series(2). From Indianapolis, Apollo and Meg travel with Grover to California,
only to find that the Labyrinth there has become filled with supernatural
flame, causing the land to wither. With the aid of old friends, including Coach
Gleeson Hedge, Piper Maclean and Jason Grace, Apollo and Meg must walk into the
burning maze, knowing it is a trap, and confront the most dangerous member of
the Triumvirate, an Emperor who has set his sights on the sun itself.
While none of Riordan’s books are exactly super-fluffy, this is perhaps
the first to truly embrace tragedy. Opening with a Lemony Snicket-style
disclaimer that more than any other, this chapter of the life of Lester Popadopoulos
is one that he doesn’t want to write and doesn’t advise you to read, and I’m
not going to lie: for long-term fans of the series, this one is going to sting.
However, the tragedy – the book is dedicated to Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy, ‘I
hope you’re happy’ – is not gratuitous, but both earned by and vital to the course
of the narrative. It’s a part of Apollo’s growth arc, but also very much
belongs to the characters more directly involved. People do not die to further
Apollo’s story, but in their own stories which stand adjacent to his. In fact,
it is this sense that the world is made up not of one story, but of multiple
interlocking stories, which is a strength of the Trials of Apollo, a series in
which the protagonist is almost a bystander, an observer to the adventures of
others.
Next up, one of my rare paper reads, as I shelled out for the Night’s
Black Agents sourcebook Dracula
Unredacted. This is essentially the text of Dracula, but with some altered
and some additional passages, some altered dates, a slightly rearranged
timeline and three sets of footnotes to convert the novel into an account of an
actual vampire incursion. The conceit is that Stoker adapted the true events of
a disastrous attempt to recruit Dracula as an intelligence asset, as part of
the cover up of the fallout from that attempt.
Now, the main thing that strikes me about this book is that it is not
entirely complete. It says on the back that it is designed to be a player
resource for the Night’s Black Agents scenario The Dracula Dossier and that means that the book, and especially
the footnotes, contain a whole slew of references that get no pay-off or
explanation. The additional material is interesting, but its pay-off is again
not always in the book itself. In particular, I feel slightly aggrieved at the
inclusion of Kate Reed – a character from early drafts of the novel, now better
known for her substantial roles in the Anno Dracula series – only for her to be
locked away and forgotten when she proves to be compromised by Dracula, while
our ‘heroes’ pursue their single-minded quest to save the incomparable Mina. I
mean, I like Mina, but the reverence the other characters show for her borders
on the fanatical.
Actually, you know what, it’s not just Mina. They’re the same about
Lucy, and what bothers me with the inclusion of Kate Reed is that, by keeping
most of the text as is, she is apparently the only living woman in the world not worthy of this obsessive,
pedestal-setting worship. When everyone is saying that Mina shouldn’t be
involved anymore because of her delicate sensibilities, does anyone give a
thought for Kate’s? No. She is apparently unworthy even of condescension.
So, yeah; it’s an interesting, but ultimately flawed work, or possibly
just not really intended as a stand-alone novel.
Still on a Dracula tip, Quincey
Harker: Year One – or, more precisely, Year
One: A Quincey Harker Demon Hunter Collection – is an anthology of novellas
following the adventures of the son of Mina and Jonathan Harker, who gained
immortality from Dracula’s influence on his parents and has, in the time
leading to the present day setting, become a skilled fighter and magician, devoting
himself to fighting demons. By the second story he has a unique bond with an
unusually badass female detective, and works for Homeland Security as a demon
hunting consultant. He also maintains close contact with his ‘Uncle Luke’, aka
Dracula, and his super-butler Renfield(3).
Quincey Harker is pretty by
the numbers paranormal mystery. We’re in the early phases, so no gratuitous
sex, but Harker has some internalised misogyny to work through and Detective Rebecca
Gail Flynn is a cookie cutter tough female cop. In addition, there are areas
where the novellas contradict one another, or even themselves. It’s not
terrible, and avoids some, but not all, of the worst clichés – men and women
face violence more-or-less equally, although we do open with a case of a girl
drugged to be impregnated by a demon – and is competently written and read.
If that last sounds like slim praise, it is important. My next listen, The Paper Magician, came highly
recommended, and I really didn’t like it, and I think a lot of that – but not
all – comes down to the reading. This is a danger with audiobooks, of course,
and I think also hit me with the highly-recommended Sorcerer of the Crown.
Anyway, The Paper Magician is
set at the turn of the 20th century, in an alternate version of
England where magic is, if not common, then at least a fact of life, and where
magicians bond with a single, man-made material to work magic. Ceony Twill is
an apprentice magician who, due to quotas, is assigned to bond to paper,
instead of metal, as she had wanted, because paper is shit and stuff, and her
mentor is mental. Anyway, she cooks and cleans and launders for her mentor,
Magician Emery Thane, and then he gets his heart ripped out by his psycho ex
and Ceony realises he’d look hot in a tux and sets out to rescue him, a process
that will involve travelling through his heart and learning how to use paper to
fight.
My biggest problem with this novel is that it is set in England in the
early years of the 20th century, but written in an American
vernacular, a flaw emphasised by the fact that the narrator is also American.
To make matters worse, the narrator’s English accent for the characters is not
strong, with Ceony in particular sounding snooty in situations where she is
supposed to come off as brave, defiant, or even whimsical. Additionally, while
the world intrigued me, the characters did not, and in particular the romance –
or rather, pre-romance – between Ceony and Emery was deeply unengaging. This
romance really dominated the second half of the novel, with Ceony at one point
struck by the sexiness of Emery’s handwriting, and served largely to cast the
conflict between Ceony and the excisioner – flesh magician – Lyra(4) primarily
in terms of the latter’s jealousy of her ex-husband’s apprentice eliminates any
possibility of exploring the philosophical and political aspects of the
forbidden magic that she practices. I mean, she animates severed limbs; I’m not
sure layering femme fatale on top of that was really needed, and I would rather
have learned more about the Magicians’ cabinet and the historical turns that
resulted in Westminster Abbey being an unremarkable church merely close to the
political heart of a secular nation.
Read, or with a different narrator, The
Paper Magician might not be so problematic, but for me at least the rest of
the series feels like a pass.
Finally, as I began the series with Arya, I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on
my own account, which I think is my first re-read. It’s a very different book to the rest of the series, taking the action
away from Hogwarts, embracing the intrinsic combative potential of wizards, and
seeing our heroes adopt two of the three ‘unforgivable’ curses with barely a
batted eyelid. I still think that the Battle of Hogwarts is a missed
opportunity for at least some of Slytherin to make good. Snape is honestly
rather too vicious in the earlier novels to be fully redeemed by his motives, but
it’s not as if any of the other teachers at Hogwarts were natural teaching
material. The wizarding world has some issues, is really what I’m saying.
(1) She is capable of reading them herself, but in doing so focuses on
the words to the expense of the story.
(2) Using the Greek mythology, so it’s five parts, where other
mythologies get three.
(3) A successor, not a descendent.
(4) Or Leera, or Lira; this is the other problem with audiobooks.
