When A Man Is Tired of London

Books read this week: The Wasteland (T.S. Eliot) 9/10, Rivers of London (Ben Aaronowitch) 8/10, Moon Over Soho (Ben Aaronovitch) 8/10, Summer Knight (Jim Butcher) 7/10, First Lord's Fury (Jim Butcher) 7/10

London is an old city. Dozens of neighbourhoods, rivers, myths and legends all it's own; Spring Heeled Jack and Jack Ketch, Gin Lane and Tyburn. Two millenia of history lies thick on the streets like a victorian smog. And that's why Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series is so brilliant. It's an urban fantasy set in London, focusing on a black police constable who just happens to also be a wizard in training. It's strange that so much urban fantasy is set in the states; there's not really any proper urban history there, and so the author always has quite a difficulty trying to explain why scary old and eldritch horrors have decided to take a vacation to some dull city in the American midwest, but I guess authors write what they know. Rivers of London is probably most similar to Charles Stross' Laundry series, but it's a more serious take on things. It is also interesting to compare the British and American approaches to supernatural terror; Americans tend to assume that private investigators or some other non-government organisation will deal with the supernatural beasties using swords, axes and magic; the government is at best ignorant of the supernatural, and at worst actively malicious.

The British series, on the other hand, and rather more sensibly, tend to assume that the government knows and actively tries to manage the supernatural, and that if a threat is sufficiently severe a transit van full of guys in balaclavas will turn up and shoot it to death, and then burn it (it's the only way to be sure). It's also nice to see a protagonist in an urban fantasy book who isn't white and middle class (and doesn't, as yet, seem to have any massive destiny coming to him). The British series also focus more on the massive impact the Second  World War would have had on the supernatural community in Britain; American novels tend to gloss over it; assume that somehow the wizards could remain aloof, or that the war didn't have much impact. To the US, the war happened half a world away; it was something men were sent away to fight in and it never touched the  American mainland. In the UK, on the other hand, Churchill was willing to use chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, if necessary; had the Nazis invaded, he would have set the sea on fire; any possible weapon, no matter how odd, no matter how far fetched, no matter how forbidden would have been investigated, would have been tested, would have been used. A further advantage the British series have is the distinct lack of lycanthrope porn (yay!).

Of my other books this week, The Wasteland is one of my favourite poems; the opening line of the fourth section "Phlebas the phoenician, a fortnight dead" is one the most beautiful lines in English literature. The charm of the poem lies in the beauty of the language; kind of like opera, even if you don't know what it actually means, you can still appreciate the the exquisite craftsmanship that went into making something that sounds so harmonious.