Mr. Norrell and Jonathan Strange – Susanna Clarke

Wow, wow, wow – this is a novel to be in awe of. A thousand pages of incredibly written literary fantasy that keeps you gripped page after page.

It’s an impossible task to summarise the plot! A few things though. It’s set in the nineteenth century. Mr Norrell is an arrogant fuddy-duddy who believes he is the only person who can perform magic properly, and after a successful conjurring in York Minster goes to London and gets the ear of government.

Jonathan Strange is a young upstart who discovers an ability to do magic, becomes Norell’s apprentice but eventually moves on, his arrogance and desire to practice magic at his own pace getting the better of him.

Through the story the pair practice magic of many kinds, often with effects unknown to them. In particular, their magical activities break the barrier between the human and the fairy world, in which a  fairy with ‘thistle-down hair’ keeps people enthralled and controlled.

A woman – central to the story – who Norrell brought back from the dead (Lady Pole), Strange’s wife (Arabella) and Lady Pole’s servant (Stephen) all find themselves trapped each evening in this fairy world, but unable to break out or even speak of it during the day, such is the magic of the fairy.

Broken by the eventual death of his wife, Jonathan Strange reaches a point where he conjures up a darkness, a massive column in the centre of Venice, and eventually Strange and Norrell confront the fairy’s magic.

There’s so much more plot to this book – so many nuances and lines of fancy – but this is the heart of the story.

So what to say? A few things.

First, the style: incredible. Think of Charles Dickens if he were writing today in a way that mocks himself. Susanna Clarke write like a knowing Dickens, laughing at the characters and their ridiculous ways of behaving. But at the same time the book is full of footnotes and references, all fictional, to give the sense that this is a historically accurate record.

Then there’s the themes. There are some social themes. In particular, the main characters are men, with the women having only a secondary role, and you can’t help but assume that’s done intentionally, to reflect the ridiculous sexism of the time in which the book’s based.

And there’s a class schism. Many of the main characters are upper class, as you’d expect of that time. But it’s the servants and assistants who guide what they do and often provide the most interest – Stephen, a black servant to the Poles who has more about him than anyone, if only he weren’t trapped in the other world; and Childermass, Norrell’s servant who like Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, is the political brains behind his boss’s – and his own – success.

And there’s a beautiful battle between the old and the new. Norrell is a stuffy traditionalist who wants to keep things as they are, to maintain his own status. Strange is an innovator, wanting to experiment and try out new magical practice. But actually, in the end, both are are as bad as each other, creating forces they know nothing of, an other-worldly magical force that imprisons many and threatens to take over the human world.

And that’s maybe the great theme of this book: When you dabble in magic you can’t expect there to be no consequences. It’s an ungovernable power and you need to expect something in return. In this case the fairy with the thistle-down hair trapping people in his world and moving to destroy or at least invade the existing one. If you play with fire, expect to get burned.

Chivalry – Neil Gaiman

Such a disarming story. It’s charming, funny and utterly pleasant. But there’s a lot going on underneath – as there is beneath the protagonist’s ‘niceness’.

Mrs Whittaker is an old woman, widowed and living alone, though apparently quite content. On one of her regular visits to Oxfam after picking up her pension, she sees on the shelf for 30p, the Holy Grail. She buys it thinking it will look good on the mantle piece. It will look ‘nice’ she says, as she does about much else.

Shortly after, she is visited by a very gallant Sir Galahad on his horse who has been on a quest to find the Holy Grail for ‘a very long time’, which we can assume means for centuries or longer. She declines to give him it, and so begins a number of attempts by Galahad to offer Mrs Whittaker mythical treasures in return for the Grail. They talk over pots of tea and fruitcake. He helps with some chores. And eventually she accepts the philosopher’s stone and a phoenix in return, as they’d look ‘nice’ on the mantle piece. It ends beautifully with Mrs Whittaker in Oxfam the following week, picking up a strange looking lamp from the shelf but deciding not to take it as she has no space left to display it on the mantle piece.

It’s such a hilarious idea for a story that you smile throughout. And it’s reinforced by the style – so pleasant, everyone is polite and kind, it feels whimsical.

But you can’t help notice that Mrs Whittaker, beneath the platitudes, knows exactly what’s going on – what the objects are, their power, and the desire driving Lancelot beneath his apparent chivalry. She’s wise, experienced, and although it’s never said, she knows that the desire for magical tools is corrupting.

She doesn’t want the bother, though, so she says nothing. Maybe she’s old, done all of that already. Who knows what secrets she hides, or what’s in her past? Everything is described as ‘nice’ – a non-descript word that glosses over and distracts from her probably vast knowledge of the world.

---

Image from the graphic novel, illustrated by Colleen Doran.

“You are a strange creature…

“You are a strange creature – the very reverse of all the magicians of the last centuries. They were full of learning but had no talent. You have talent and no knowledge.”

Says Childermass to Vinculus, in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Piranesi – Susanna Clarke

This is an impressive book. Short, but it packs mystery, philosophy and a whole two worlds into it.

We start the novel in the same position as Piranesi – thrown into another world, a huge, perhaps infinite house, full of enormous halls and beautiful sculptures, periodically awash with tides of water. Like Piranesi we don’t know where this place is, what it is, or what his role is within it. It seems almost unpopulated, save for the statues and the thirteen or so bodies he catalogues. The only living person is the Other, whom Piranesi meets twice a wee.k to help the Other catalogue the halls, and who Piranesi assumes lives in distant hall. 

Piranesi is like a holy fool in a way, an Idiot in that Dostoyevsky-esque kind of way; he is open, naive, trusting, all aided by the fact that he has no memory of almost anything but the present, an eternal present in which he lives. He pieces together the past through fragments of journals that he incessantly writes, and which in fact form the structure and narrative of the novel.

It gradually transpires – *a few spoilers to come* – that the Other is not all he seems, and nor is Piranesi. Both are from this world originally but Piranesi was tricked into dwelling in this magical realm and cataloguing it for the Other. Both were in fact academics in the real world, the Other a scholar who worked with an infamous ‘transgressive thinker’ called Arne-Sayles, who had discovered – to everyone’s disbelief – that through a ritual it was possible to enter this alternate world. He was a charlatan in many ways, it turns out, but the part about entering another world was true, and he and Ketterley (who is in fact the Other) had duped many followers into visiting this world, never to return.

It’s a kind ontological or metaphysical whodunnit in its plot as Piranesi gradually discovers the truth;  but it’s the idea the whole story is premised on that intrigues.

The world that Piranesi finds himself in is not like ours – it’s magisterial and awe inspiring and beautiful, not grubby and everyday. There are no people, only statues which depict activities and things. It’s washed clean by tides regularly. What Clarke is showing us, I think, is the imperfect but interesting world we occupy, and the Platonic ideals that our world always and perhaps even by definition fails to deliver. Which would you want to live in you can’t help asking: the empty, vast halls of perfection, or the noisy, messy reality? For Piranesi it’s both, as it might be for all of us given the choice. We all want something perfect sometimes, but we’d rarely sacrifice our complex reality for it.

Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch

This is a witty read full intriguing characters and myths, and somewhere between a police procedural and fantasy fiction.

It’s the first in what is now a successful series, and it’s Peter Grant’s story of how, as a new police officer, he interviews a ghost and then very quickly discovers – and become’s part of – a small unit in the Metropolitan police that investigates supernatural crimes.

He discovers that all manner of things exist that he previously would have been incredulous about – ghosts, vampires, magic (which he starts to learn), gods, women of the rivers of London (one of whom he falls for), the lot. He finds that the police chiefs know about this division of the Met, but just don’t talk about it. And most significantly, he discovers Mr Punch.

Mr Punch is the spirit of rebellion and riot, and possesses people in order to make them act out fatal parts of the Punch and Judy play, which invariably end in their death. It takes Grant and his mentor in supernatural policing, Nightingale, a while to see the pattern, but eventually it becomes clear. In the end there are a fair few deaths, but the pattern and the cause are discovered – and just before Grant’s friend / crush, Lesley, is given the full Mr Punch treatment.

The concept of the supernatural department of the Met is a good premise, and Grant’s initial surprise and subsequent initiation into this world of the weird is one of the strongest parts of this book. It’s a readable novel too. It’s witty and easy to get through, with lots of set pieces and parts that on their own are good, and characters that are intriguing. Nightingale, for example, who appears to have lived for over a hundred years but looks much younger. Or Beverley, who is herself a river, one of the tributaries of the Thames, but also likes to drive a fancy car.

It was a bit of a male book, in that it’s a story told from the perspective of kind but slightly laddish heterosexual bloke. And I’m not sure how the whole thing pieces together – all the parts were good but I couldn’t quite follow the whole plot. Though that’s like many crime novels, Raymond Chandler for example example, so you know, Aaronovitch is on good company.

The Book of Dust Volume 1 – Philip Pullman

How different this is from the original Dark Materials trilogy. But how good it is too!

Whereas the original novels were complex, layered, with multiple stories and extensive world-building, this prequel is incredibly simple – though it’s simplicity is possible only because Pullman had done so much to create the world in his earlier books.

The Book of Dost vol. one tells Lyra’s story just after her birth, before she is even given sanctuary at St Jordans, the college in Oxford where she grows up. She is just a baby and save for occasional appearances from Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, almost none of the characters we know feature in this story.

Instead it’s the tale of two young teens, Malcolm, a practical kid whose parents own the local pub, The Trout, and Alice, a surly kitchen assistant there. Malcolm discovers that a young baby is being looked after by the local nuns and gradually comes to visit and look after Lyra. He hears rumblings that she is precious, and that agents from the CCD – a branch of the Magisterium – are in pursuit of Lyra, along with the terrifying Bonneville, and the spies of The League of St Alexander, which is turning children against parents and teachers.

When a devastating flood hits, Malcolm and Alice escape with Lyra in his canoe (La Belle Sauvage), but the CCD and Bonneville are following them. Much of the book covers their journey, as they struggle through the flood water around Oxford and then eventually choose to head towards London, to Lord Asriel’s address.

Along the way they encounter problem after problem – some of them highly practical (water, cold, hunger), others magical (haunted islands, fairytale baby snatchers), all of them dangerous. And more than anything we see them grow in their skills and their emotions, with Alice warming and Malcolm falling for her but not understanding what that means, and both of them giving everything to care for the helpless Lyra.

It really is a good read, this novel. It’s simple and uncluttered in its style, and very single-minded, focused almost entirely on Malcolm and Alice, not flitting between worlds and characters as we came to expect of Pullman’s previous Dark Materials stories.

The Buried Giant – Kazuo Ishiguro

This is a beguiling book. Mirroring the experiences of the characters, it edges around the real issues at stake so that you can sense what it’s about, but never fully grasp it.

Set in an early England divided between Britons and Saxons, it’s a work of what you might call literary fantasy. It has many of the hallmarks of literary fiction – limited action, in-depth character study, big themes – but uses features of fantasy, like ogres, dragons, the boatman who takes people to their death, and the myths of Arthurian legend.

It’s a simple and slowly-told story, of an old couple – Beatrice and Axl – who set out on a journey to visit their son in a nearby village. On the way they meet a warrior, Winston, a teenager called Edwin who journeys with Winston, and Sir Gawain, a knight trained and entrusted by King Arthur to protect a she-dragon.

They group travel together, and on the way stumble across villages, monks in a remote monastery trying to protect their power, children alone poisoning a goat in order to kill an ogre, a tricksy boatman who offers to take them to the other side – oh, and a woman who is annoyed with the boatman and turns up every day to kill a rabbit in front of him in his shed.

t’s style too, is worth – largely driven by conversations between the main characters that are all stilted and formal, reflecting both the period in which it’s written, and the way in which there is something getting in the way of people expressing themselves openly.

Because the key thing about this book is the buried giant, a metaphor for the way in which a ‘mist’ has settled on everyone to make them forget their past. Sometimes they grasp tiny fragments of things past, but mostly not. All are aware that there is a mist, and Beatrice and Axl learn that the cause of this mist is the dragon being protected by Sir Gawain. The truth has been obscured by myth and superstition, just as history and truth are hidden in our world.

Once the dragon is dead, they realise, the mist will clear and people will remember their past, as individuals and as a country. Whether that’s the reason why Britons and Saxons dislike one another, or the bits of their relationship with one another, and their long-parted son, that momentarily occur to Axl and Beatrice.

Partly the question the book raises is whether it’s better to know the truth or not. There’s a kind of blissful ignorance, both to Axl and Beatrice’s life, and to that of the people of this world; once the past is known, their deeds will be out in the open, and it will be hard for people to reconcile their differences and disagreements with one another. But at the same the old couple, just like the people of this troubled world, long to know their past, to understand how they’e come to be who they are; it’s only by understanding the past, after all, that it’s possible to understand the present.

So you might think that Ishiguro’s message is that the truth will out, or that it’s better to know the truth even if it’s a hard one. But he doesn’t offer that kind of platitude. But in fact he shows that when the truth is revealed it can cause problems. This is made clear by Beatrice and Axl. At the end of the book (*spoiler alert*) the boatman says they can travel together to the island, a kind of special dispensation for couples in deep love; they seem to be on the verge of travelling together, but once they discover hitherto obscured truths about their relationship and arguments in the past the boatman he no longer offers them that dispensation and in the end cannot travel to the afterlife together.

So it’s an ambiguous story, ultimately. We bury the truth, and that’s not a good thing. But revealing the truth doesn’t bring easy answers, and brings problems of it’s own.

“Axl saw that a serpent, disturbed in the grass by the soldier’s fall, was now sliding out from under the body. Though dark, the creature was mottled with yellows and whites, and as it revealed more of itself, travelling swiftly across the ground, Axl caught the powerful odour of a man’s insides… Still it kept coming their way, parting in two around a clump of thistle, as a stream might part around a rock, before becoming one again and continuing ever closer.”

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

The Amber Spyglass – Philip Pullman

The third part of the Dark Materials series brings us more of the brilliant Lyra and Will, as well as thought-provoking reflection on religion, science and faith.

In terms of plot, a lot happens (*spoiler alert*), with The Amber Spyglass adding a number of overlapping and interweaved storylines.

We find Lyra has been captured by her now very conflicted mother, Mrs Coulter, who holds her in a deep sleep, both menacing and loving at the sane time.

Will, meanwhile, is searching for Lyra, with the help of Iorek Byrnison, the Gyptians and with two surly angels assisting him.

We get the addition of Professor Mary Malone, a small part in The Subtle Knife bit bigger here, who has crossed into another world now and meets the muelefa – another type of creature altogether – becoming their friend and helper.

We see Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel coming together to protect their daughter Lyra from afar.

The Magesterium, meanwhile, sent out a priest and mercenary to find and kill Will snd Lyra, knowing what the alithiometer says about their role in shaping the world.

Undeterred, though, Lyra and Will leave behind their daemons to visit the land of the dead, where they battle to stay alive, eventually freeing the tormented ghosts – including Roger and John Parry – from an eternity of misery.

And in the end Lyra and Will realise they are in love, but that they can’t live with one another in a different world from their own.

I really enjoyed m some of the storylines, especially Will and Lyra’s adventures; they are fantastic fictional creations, though actually I found this novel less a little less gripping than previous ones – perhaps because of the Mary Malone story which less engaging.

I guess for me the big, interesting aspect of The Amber Spyglass (like the rest of the series) is its treatment of religion – the angels, the underworld, the fates, the twisting and turning of the Magesterium who do all they can to control people’s lives.

Will’s Dad, when they meet in the world of the dead, says to them that “we have to build the republic of heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere” and in the end, that’s probably the most powerful theme of the book. Yes, there are multiple worlds, there are endless possibilities that we could search for, but you need to do what you can, to commit to improving, where you are. And in fact the novel ends with a reference to this, as Lyra and Will begin to build their own lives separately, in the worlds where they began. Sad but resolute in creating futures for themsevelves.

Dust also plays an important role in this third part of the series, bigger than in The Subtle Knife.its reinforced that dust is like dark matter, not something that we can fully explain or understand, but some kind of conscious matter on which all life depends. In a way it like the concept of substance that Spinoza talks about – a kind of life-force that flows through everything, that animates everything, that is everything.

Interestingly, substance, for Spinoza, spanned God and nature, and the implication of Pullman’s ideas about dust is something similar – a kind of entity that is both physical and non-physical, that is a thing of the world, but also beyond it, that requires a leap of faith to understand it, but is nevertheless real.

Organised religion, in the form of the Magesterium, might try to suppress knowledge of this dust, of this substance, but it’s a truth that exists despite them. We can have faith in an unknowable power that lies behind everything, Pullman seems to be saying, but not in established religions that use that faith for their own interests.

The Subtle Knife – Philip Pullman

The second in the Dark Materials series, this book adds a satisfying layer of depth to the plot, weaving a number of gripping stories together.

Most importantly, we meet Will, a twelve year old from our world who is on the run from people unknown to him who are after the information in a notebook his long-missing explorer father had left. After Will accidentally kills one of his attackers he finds himself disappearing through a gap into another world, Cittagazze. Will is intent on returning the notes to his father; he knows it’s important, despite not knowing why.

We meet Lyra again who at the end of the first book had gone through the Northern Lights into a different world too, and also finds herself in Cittagazze. She see meets Will, as if it’s destined, and they realise they have common cause, intending to work together to get the notes to Will’s father and alithiometer to Lord Asriel.

Their story is the most engrossing. They flit between Citagazze and modern Oxford, Lyra coming to terms with the strangeness of our world. They meet Sir Charles, who it turns out is an ally of Mrs Coulter, tricking Lyra in order to steal the alithiometer. And Lyra meets a physicst, Mary Malone, exploring dark matter and who suspects that it somehow has consciousness and powers of prediction; with help from Lyra she comes to see its significance of this substance, what is called Dust in Lyra’s world, and destroys the research she’s done before Sir Charles can discover what she’s learnt, and travels into another world herself.

And then there’s the knife. In a tower in Citagazze a young man, half mad with power, fear and paranoia, has possession of the subtle knife. With Lyra alongside, Will fights him, eventually becoming the bearer of the knife – an incredible invention from Pullman, a knife that can cut through worlds, allowing Will to step from one world to another almost at will. Will loses his two of fingers in the process – the mark of the bearer – but gains incredible power with the knife.

And beyond Lyra and Will so much happens. There’s Cittagazze itself, a now desolate city populated only by children, where adults have been turned into empty shells by Spectres, entities that feast on adult deamons, but which kids can’t see or be affected by. It’s a disturbing image Pullman gives us, of children surrounded by dark creatures that circle but can’t touch them. There are the witches , ed by Serafina Pekkana, who are helping Lyra and Will find WIll’s father and Lord Asriel. And there’s Lee Scoresby, the aeronaut who, with guidance from the witches, is entrusted to find and help the shaman Dr Grumman, who it turns out is Will’s father, and who is searching for the subtle knife too.

Whereas the first book in this series was for me all about consciousness and the nature of reality – all about the themes and ideas it began to unravel – this book feel like it’s more about the plot, character and imagination, and Lyra and Will’s overlapping stories in particular are just brilliant, as they slip through worlds battling everyone trying to block them.

That said, Pullman does develop his ideas about the dark material or Dust that animates reality. What he hints at is that it’s a version of the dark matter and energy that physicists suspect make up the majority of the universe – an entity that exists but about which we know nothing. And he talks more about this matter as a conscious entity, not just existing but somehow knowing and acting too. It feels like darkness, in the sense of something being unknown to us, plays an important role in the series – the dark materials are unknown in the way that dark matter is unknown to us now. We might be able to learn more about it, but right now, it’s beyond us.

As in the first book too, throughout The Subtle Knife Pullman reflects on religion as a structure of power, nothing more; a way for people to maintain control over others by keeping the secrets of dark matter to themselves. There’s a constant contrast being drawn to the wonder of discoveries through science and the single-minded interest in power from the religious – a contrast that contradicts common understandings of science and religion.

He also gives us a pretty damning picture of parents and their self-important projects! Lord Asriel, who abandons Lyra to make his great discovery, Mrs Coulter who stops at nothing for her own power, Will’s father, who does exactly the same as Lord Asriel it turns out. In fact, in Cittagezze only children are safe from the Spectres who feast on the corrupted consciousness of adults. Always its children, with their innocence and determination that matters, adults are pretty much a lost cause. For such an strongly anti-religion novel, in fact, it’s a very Catholic interpretation of personhood and morality.

“That is what the church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. So if a war comes, and the church is on one side of it, we must be on the other, no matter what strange allies we find ourselves bound to.”

Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

Philosophy & consciousness – Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights

The first part of Pullman’s Dark Materials series is not only a gripping, rich and impressively controlled story, it’s also a fascinating thought experiment in consciousness and mind-body dualism. Oh, and a pretty damning commentary on religion and science too.

I guess I don’t need to go into the plot too much. Suffice to say, Lyra is a young girl with a gift and a destiny, who tracks down the child-cutters and her scientist-adventurer father, all of whom are intent on either repressing or discovering some of the truths about their world, not least that multiple worlds co-exist and that a mysterious material powers consciousness and life forces nobody yet understands.

The imagination and the characters are immense: Lyra herself, her faithful friend and armoured bear Iorek, her possessed mother Mrs Coulter and father Lord Asriel, the Gyptians like John Fa, Lee Scoresby the aeronaut, and so many others. And, unlike the books of Tolkien, to which this is often compared, it is much deeper, with characters with ambiguous motives, both good and evil, and a constant comment on some big issues.

I’m guessing I’ll do a bigger analysis of this once I’ve read the rest of the series (I’m reading the second book now), but for me there are a few things that really stand out.

One is the sense in the book that both science and religion have their fundamentalists. There’s Lord Asriel, who will stop at nothing, will sacrifice almost everything – including his life with a daughter, and what little faith she has in him – to make his great discovery: the existence of the elusive entity know as Dust that animates everything and offers an entrance to multiple worlds that exist alongside theirs (and ours). And there’s the Magasterium, a catholic church-like religious authority that is trying to limit people in just the same way as religion does all over: supporting the repression of people’s so-called dark side by physically cutting away the daemons of children; and trying to silence those, like Lord Asriel, who are aiming to uncover truths that challenge their claims, and authority.

Another is the overlap between science and religion. Today there is an apparently clear distinction, at least in popular discourse, between the two – faith vs. rationality, cold hard facts vs. wooly belief. What we see in Northern Lights, though, is that things are way more complicated. The Magasterium are calculating rationalists focused on power, whereas scientists like Lord Asriel have a faith in something that they’ve not yet discovered. Pullman uses the language of pre-enlightenment times, where religion, natural philosophy and science met in something like a Venn diagram, to illustrate this ambiguity.

And the big thing for me about this novel is it’s interesting treatment of consciousness and, in particular, the way it illustrates a position on the mind-body question in philosophy. Since Descartes, there has been what’s called a dualist conception of consciousness and body – that people have a physical body, but that doesn’t define who they are; rather they are defined by their soul or their consciousness – their desires, likes, dislikes, values, experiences etc – which together constitute what it’s like to be them. We commonly think now that this consciousness, this thing that makes someone them, resides in their mind, though at other times the soul has been thought to live in the heart, say.

What Pullman’s Northern Lights offers us is a thought experiment: it allows us to imagine what it would be like if your consciousness didn’t reside inside your body but was in fact separate – a daemon, a creature that both lived alongside you and was you at the same time. For Lyra its Pan. For Mrs Coulter it’s a golden monkey. All humans, and some non-humans, have them in Lyra’s world.

Because in this world a person’s consciousness is not contained within their body it’s possible to cut consciousness off without physically damaging the person in a way that’s not possible where consciousness is contained in our brain or body somehow. And so what Pullman bring to life is the distinction between consciousness and the body. When a child is cut away from their daemon, their physical body remains intact, but their personality, drives, interests – what makes them conscious, who they are – are no longer there.

Often a person who has their daemon cut away stumbles on for a few days before dying, but Pullman does refer to a group of soldiers who have been cut away from their daemons who continue to live, who just obey orders without question, acting without consciousness, and he called them ‘zombis’. This corresponds to a term sometimes used in the philosophy of mind, a zombie. It is a related thought experiment in which there is a copy of someone, who has all their physical attributes, including a copy of the neurons and connections that make up their brain. And the question this thought experiment poses is: are these zombies conscious? Pullman’s answer is no: when you cut away the thing that makes that person more than a bag of bones, they’re no longer conscious, no longer a person in the sense we normally mean, and it’s only by using a daemon, outside the body, to contain that person’s consciousness and personality, that its possible for him to say this, to make this point.

I suspect I’ll be able to get more into this as I read the rest of the series and think more about philosophy of mind and Northern Lights. But for now the main thing is to say wow, this is a book that not only grips you, but brings alive some big philosophical questions.

“All through that day the witches came, like flakes of black snow on the wings of a storm.”

Beautiful imagery in Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife

Sleeping in flame – Jonathan Carroll

What an intriguing and in the end gripping read; part love story, part fairly tale, part fantasy horror.

Walker is an actor living a good life in Vienna, who meets Maris, a woman who is fleeing from her violent ex, Luc, and who Walker first helps protect and then falls in love with. Their relationship develops fast and we get a lot of their back stories in the first hundred pages or so. In fact for the the first third of this books it reads like a fairly conventional love story.

But then something strange starts to happen: Walker begins to have premonitions of things to come, he discovers the grave of someone identical to him who has been dead thirty years, and gradually he learns he can perform magic.

He begins to explore this with the help of a cynical and thoroughly modern LA shaman, Venasque, who shows Walker that he is the reincarnation of many lives that his dreams are allowing him to remember.

Eventually, after Maris and Venasque are put in danger, he learns why: echoing the horrors of Rumpelstiltskin, his father from hundreds of years ago wants Walker to return to him and threatens everything he loves in order to make that happen.

It’s a gripping read, the characters are strong, and it’s quite hard to characterise this book – it’s thoughtful about so many of aspects of modern life, as well as showing how our past is weaved into our present to create who we are.

What’s most impressive, though, is the gradual shift from an apparently conventional novel to a work of fantasy, one that takes place over a couple of hundred pages until the end when you’re in a world of pure imagination, and it feels right and brilliant.

“Fat Charlie was thirsty.

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt.

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.”

Neil Gaiman’s brilliant hangover description in Anansi Boys

Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys

It’s hard to put your finger on what makes Neil Gaiman’s writing so good – it’s something to do with a gripping plot, shifts between the real and the magical, the likeable characters and, in this book anyway, the fact that things frequently work out for the best in the end.

Fat Charlie is the main protagonist, and it turns out is the son of the trickster god Anansi, which he learns only on his father’s death. He also learns he has a brother, Spider, who is a magical hedonist able to bend people to his will. And what he later learns, after visiting the realm of gods, is that Spider is in fact half of himself, his magical self, separated from him by the gods.

The plot develops after Spider visits Fat Charlie in London and takes over his life, sleeping with his girlfriend, Rosie, and causing problems at his work, with Charlie’s boss implicating him in fraud and money laundering that his boss has been committing for years. It culminates with Fat Charlie, Spider, Rosie, the boss and Daisy, an off-duty policewoman that Charlie has fallen for, all on a Caribbean island for the denouement.

It’s a beautifully plotted and written book, that makes you smile because it’s so good natured, relying on the power of the story and the characters, without stooping to grizzly deaths or sex to keep you hooked. At times it feels a little too nice, a little forced – like the bad things that happen wouldn’t be taken so lightly by the characters, that they would leave their mark more fully – but the sense of otherworldliness allows you to skip over them, just like the characters themselves do.

And there are some great scenes – not least Spider dining in a quiet restaurant with Rosie when suddenly Rosie transforms into a flock of black birds that peck and thrash and attack him, with the apparition of Rosie conjured by a bird woman-god that Fat Charlie has enlisted to get Spider out of his life…

The Fellowship of the Ring – JRR Tolkien

One of those novels that is so foundational to the whole fantasy genre and much more, The Fellowship of the Ring is a book I wanted to re-read but found that, although I loved the world building, it’s maybe a weaker book than the Tolkien I’ve just read, The Hobbit.

The imagination, the world building, is, of course, astounding. What is great is how so much of it is the core of a now-established mythology – the creatures, the language, the ideas, they are found in different ways throughout popular culture. Orcs, goblins, hobbits, dwarves… everything. I’m not sure how much Tolkien invented and how much he borrowed, but it’s clear he builds a systematic world around them. Even things like Lembas, the life giving Elven bread, is the name of a wholefood wholesaler in Sheffield, for example…

Great too is the building of the ‘company’ with all their quirks and different skills. The introduction of Aragorn or Strider in particular is captivating, he’s such a strong character; and the company’s gradual bonding as they travel for months on end through dangerous or arduous territory is powerful.

But, as the first part of a trilogy, this feels like a pretty slow start. Despite some big moments, most notably Gandalf’s battle with the Balrog and Boromir’s challenge to Frodo over the ring, much of the book is scene-setting and descriptive, with the major battles yet to come in the second and third parts. The language too, especially the dialogue, is pretty antiquated.

I think the major drawback of the Fellowship of the Ring, as opposed to The Hobbit has, is that it lacks two important things.

Humour. Perhaps because the latter is written for younger audiences it’s a big lighter, more fun to read, whereas in the Fellowship there’s a lot of drudgery, which makes it ultimately less enjoyable, denser maybe and lacking an element of joy.

Second, moral ambiguity. Whereas in The Hobbit the ring is a corrupting influence – with Gollum a clear example, but even Bilbo struggling to do the right thing at times – in the Fellowship there is a much clearer sense of right and wrong with characters like Aragorn, Legolas and Frodo rarely tempted by darkness. And this lack of depth makes it in some ways a thinner book than The Hobbit despite it being twice the number of pages.

“For anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather overcrowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.”

JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

There’s so much hype about the film version of The Hobbit it’s easy to forget that it’s quite an understated book with a more complex take on morality than you might think.

The novel follows the journey of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit torn between homeliness and adventure. He is visited by a troop of dwarves, led by former King Thorin, and the wizard Gandalf. They persuade him to join them on a journey to reclaim the dwarves’ stolen treasure, guarded by an enormous and dangerous dragon.

An epic adventure ensues, meeting trolls, goblin armies, giants, elves, men, enormous spiders, golum – when Bilbo finds the invisibility ring – and eventually arriving at the mountain on the other side of Mirkwood, where they wait to enter and steal the treasure.

Their desire for the treasure is so strong that obstinate Thorin nearly begins a war between the elves, men and dwarves. It’s only Bilbo and, more significantly, an approaching goblin army that unites the three armies against a shared enemy.

In my mind, before reading this, I associated The Hobbit with a pretty blunt good versus evil morality tale, but reading it I see there are in fact some psychological subtleties. The three races of dwarf, man and elf are all good, in contrast to the goblins, but to some extent corrupted by money. The dwarves in particular almost cause a war with the elves and men because they won’t give up any of their fortune they consider theirs. It’s a position that is understandable given the historic theft of the gold and the consequent impoverishment of the dwarf kingdom, but nevertheless is short-sighted and foolishly selfish.

My feeling is that it’s quite a male book, because it focuses on war and gallantry and power – and because there are NO women characters, not a single female of significance in the whole book. So perhaps its story of what it takes to ‘do the right thing’ has a particularly masculine bent – I’m not sure – but nevertheless it doesn’t shy away from the competing drives that reside in the main characters, making it a good story with some satisfying depth.

“It seemed as if darkness flowed out like a vapour from the hole in the mountain-side, and deep darkness in which nothing could be seen lay before their eyes, a yawning mouth leading in and down.”

JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit