Kate Griffin - The Neon Court

We destroy the enemies of the city, drive back unstoppable darknesses and purge the night of the things that would make us fear (pp. 40-1)

If anyone is looking for a blueprint for how to do a sequel properly, Kate Griffin’s The Midnight Mayor might suffice. It makes the first book, A Madness of Angels, bigger and more explosive without making it silly. Moreover, it covers the same thematic ground as the first book (Magic is life…) but does it from the other direction (Life is magic…) and so manages to both expand on a theme and cover new ground. Of course, a year after The Midnight Mayor, it was time for book three. The Neon Court has many things going for it, not the least of which are Griffin’s prose and another slice of London’s magic. But it is not quite the perfect sequel (to a sequel).

Having looked from both directions at the relationship between magic and life, Griffin here decides to take a closer look at what form that relationship takes in the various magical groups that make up the city. This is a book about community and about isolation. The conflict that it begins with is a looming war between the Neon Court and the Tribe. The Court is society’s crystallization, humans twisted into nothing but what is expected of them by others, life turned into high theater: We imagined that he was what the times called beautiful, a work of art, not a human at all, assuming there was anything of the human left in him (p. 315). That beauty is, needless to say, a mask (p. 349). The Tribe, already down beaten by society and outside its embrace, have decided to flee and fight civilization: the lost, the young, the scarred, the angry, the old, the lonely, anyone and everyone who wasn’t one of them, transformed in this place into one of us, the outcast, united by being outcasts (p. 241). This, they say, makes us free […] Not good n bad – just free. (p. 253) At first glance, the Tribe and the Court seem opposites, but both are twisted in reaction to expectations, even if one is embracing and the other battling.

Blackout is another byproduct of society. It is kicked out from society like the Tribe, but its exile has nothing of choice about it. It’s not whole humans but rather their fears, their shame. It is not a counterculture but isolation. Griffin conveys this through streams of anonymity and despair: no one need ever know what happened here just you and me just you and me and it’s not like anyone cares not here not now we can do anything because no one will ever know anything at all what can you imagine at all it doesn’t matter no one will see no one will judge us now the sun’s gone down (p. 374).

The conflict between those three – and, of course, Swift and the aldermen – shape the novel. The beginning has Swift trying to stop the war between the Tribe and Court while all whisper about a chosen one’s coming. Oh, and there’s the matter of Swift’s friend and/or mortal enemy Oda, now warped nearly out of recognition, both begging and monstrous. But all of this story is not as successful as it might have been. Like each Mathew Swift novel so far, we start with chaos and Swift struggling to figure out what’s going on as it all spirals further out of control. Here, however, much of that chaos comes to feel rather perfunctory. Swift’s premonitions of a greater evil don’t seem so much tied to anything concrete as they do the product of that just being how these stories go, so it must be around here somewhere. Furthermore, the politicking of the Court and the Tribe is not quite as deep as it is portrayed. The idea of magical diplomacy, complete with defensive alliances signed in 1959, is quite amusing, but any machination that can be exposed by simple arithmetic (Lady Neon arrived too soon, she had to be in the air by the time all this was happening (p. 74)) is simply not a masterful plot.

Then there’s the inevitable problem that results from this being the third book about the same sorcerer battling off supernatural apocalypses by the skin of his teeth. The Mathew Swift novels don’t build on each other. There isn’t one overarching story. Instead, a new ultimate evil appears each time, unrelated to the one before it. After a while, the reader starts wondering how many ultimate evils there could possibly be, why they don’t ever bump into each other, and how the world could possibly be here if there’s a yearly enactment of the Book of Revelations whenever a new novel’s about to hit the shelves. Before long, Griffin is lampshading the improbability of all this with statements like: “You’re not the guy who keeps on getting beaten up by inexplicable mystic darknesses, are you?” (p. 131) As Griffin is a damn clever writer, those almost always get a chuckle. But they also remind the reader that we’ve been here and seen this, even if we had a different villain that year.

All of the problems I’ve listed primarily bother me because the novel lacked the emotional heart I kept desiring. Mathew Swift books have always had the pyrotechnics in the front and center, but I got the feeling from the first that there were real people here and that we could get to know them if the action ever took a breath. By now, I think I’m realizing that it’s not about to. At the end of The Midnight Mayor, Swift gained an apprentice, but everything is too busy exploding in this one for us to see more of their interaction than clever banter on the way to rescues. Moreover, the relationship between Swift and Oda is central to The Neon Court’s conflict. But we never really see it. Though ostensibly bitter enemies, it’s clear that they do care about each other. But we never see more than those glimpses, and the two don’t get much time together at all between the fiery opening and the climax. As a result, Oda’s being at the center of the threat is not nearly as heart-wrenching as one might wish.

Despite all those chunky paragraphs full of flaws I just penned, I still finished The Neon Court in two days and enjoyed it quite a bit. The first reason is that, though she may have something of a surplus of them, Kate Griffin is incredibly good at evoking inexplicable mystic darknesses. As Blackout nears, night goes on unceasing, and the passage of time falls to pieces. Griffin rams this home with a mixture of dramatics and by knocking the most mundane of things slightly out of whack until they make no sense at all: It was like all these people were compressed, time-compressed, like it was school-leaving time and rush hour and party hour and happy hour and lunch hour and all hours all at once, packed in together (p. 153). That’s nothing to Blackout itself. As the power comes, it’s not just that the world disintegrates. Oh no, for to even look at Blackout is to bleed from the eyes and to soon go blind. Desperate fight scenes against a foe that you can’t even look at turn out to be nothing short of pulse pounding.

London, too, is on excellent display. Griffin manages to both make the city always feel like a place lived in and to awe us with its scale and oddities. In part, that comes from how many groups and peoples are settled within that one city and from how long they have all been there: Thing about building a modern city on a Victorian one on a Tudor one on a medieval one on a Saxon one on a Roman one, is you can guarantee there’s always going to be more down there than you bargained for (p. 223). Other descriptions have the city flexing its muscles on the plot, and they are some of Griffin’s most striking: Kayle ran, but the city no longer wanted him, the streets themselves cracked beneath his feet, the lights went out ahead of him, the buses wouldn’t brake a the shelters, the trains wouldn’t open their doors (p. 164). Many of my favorite parts of the book, though, have more to do with London’s little corners than they do with the big bangs happening in its battlegrounds. Often, on entering some new area, Griffin will dish out some little mention of a sorcerer’s strange antics there, and these glimpses of a wider world give the novel life.

Finally, Griffin’s prose is as good as it’s ever been. Her long, sensory-overload style of description is still present here and used to good effect, but I’ve no doubt covered that sufficiently in previous reviews. What I may not have made enough of us is how witty she can be: He stretched himself out further over the seat, achieving that posture seen on any form of public transport whereby one man and his testicles, by the simple act of sitting back and spreading his knees, can occupy enough space for five (p. 335). That skill enters into the dialogue. Though the Tribe’s misspelled speech can grow grating, Griffin is generally adept at not only differentiating her characters but making them feel witty and alive with each line.

The Neon Court did not strike me with the same force as The Midnight Mayor, but it is still quite a strong read. It boasts a terrifying foe, a masterfully shown city, and damn good writing. Admittedly, many of the problems on the other side of the ledger from those positives are not unique to this novel. They are, for the most part, things that were present all along in Mathew Swift but that I needed time to breathe to notice. Still, I hope that Griffin can straighten them out in The Minority Council, because I enjoy these books far too much to want to see them get stale. 

Kate Griffin - The Midnight Mayor

Druids say there is no greater wand of power than a unicorn's horn given willingly to the supplicant. In the city, there is no greater wand of power than a Zone 1-6 travelcard (p. 25).

In The Midnight Mayor, Kate Griffin returns to the magical London she established in A Madness of Angels - and what a glorious return it is. The Midnight Mayor is an exemplary sequel; it is at once bigger, badder, and more fun than the original, while also delving deeper into the why and into the very fabric of the city.

In the opening bits, we come to learn that the Midnight Mayor not only exists but was just killed; that our dear narrator, protagonist, sorcerer, and bearer of the blue electric angels, Mathew Swift, might be involved; that, whatever the truth of all that is, Mathew Swift is under deadly attack; the mythical Death of Cities is coming; and London is prophesized to fall. Whew, that's a fair bit of stuff for setup. And we don't slow down from there. To the stew, Griffin adds the Midnight Mayor's servants and the city's protectors, the Aldermen, and the story of a missing boy. Then there's Oda, a member of a sorcerer hating order who is, once again, forced to work with Swift. Needless to say, there is banter between them. Needless to say, it's damn witty.

With all that in it, The Midnight Mayor is an incredibly disorienting book. Reading, you almost never have your feet properly under you. Generally, it's more of a head-first tumble down a mineshaft. A part of that is the pacing. The Midnight Mayor starts in media res, and, when I say that, I don't mean it in the sense of, say, Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, where you get an action scene or two in the beginning and then things slow down to a steady build in which the reader and character can get oriented. London has better things to do than to let Mathew Swift find his footing. He, like the reader, is forced to piece together the puzzle of London's oncoming fall while struggling to survive every step of the way. And while we are on the subject of that puzzle, do you really think he is going to be handed all the pieces on a platter?

That brings us to the novel's world building and, with it, the novel's magic, for the two are rather inseparable. Some years ago, Brandon Sanderson (who, for an author that had absolutely nothing to do with this book, is really coming up rather a lot in its review) attempted to sit down and come up with how and why magic systems worked. Among other things, he got Sanderson's First Law of Magic. In his words: An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

Griffin takes Sanderson's law and smashes it to pieces over her sorcerous knee. Though the reader is certainly given enough of the pieces to understand each scene, they are never able to actually understand the magic of London. Likely because it, like the city itself, is simply too large, too varied, and too complex for something so pat as comprehension. Some parts, of course, are easy; this is urban sorcery, a magic of brick and neon (p. 26). Still, the reader never knows the exact limit of Swift's capabilities, and there is always the possibility of some previously unpredictable, new magical solution or element coming into play to save the day or alter the course of events. This could, obviously, be a recipe for rampant deus ex machina, but that's not the way things turn out at all.

The first part of why it all works is Griffin's imagination. Even knowing the vague ground rules – the interplay between the city and magic, the usage of the things just out of sight, and all that – there is a ton here that you'll just never see coming. But it all has a logic to it nonetheless, and when Griffin takes some wholly unexpected aspect of modernity and brings it to electric life, it makes far too much impossible sense for it to feel like a cheap shot. Her inventiveness is, needless to say, not simply relegated to plot twists and close scrapes. Many of the settings here, the minor as well as the major, are simply awesome, such as the night club run off the rhythm of the titanic heartbeat of its Executive Officer or the Heavy Metal Specters we meet in the prelude.

Then there's the matter of Griffin's prose. The first, admittedly rather nonsensical, description of it that comes to mind is simply FLASHBANGWOW. That mass of capitals isn't, I think, wholly off base. While Griffin is never quite overexcited, her prose is nonetheless supercharged with energy, and her attitude to description is anything but sparing. Griffin's writing is somewhat like looking at a photograph of a street crowded with people, buildings, cars, objects, and refuse. There's too much to take in at once, but you are going to take it in anyway, because Griffin picks up each and every one of those items and slams them into you until you have no choice but to try and grasp the entire city at once. This is not, mind you, just a when-it's-calm style that fades to more traditional and more transparent narrative in action scenes or climaxes. No, as the tension ratchets up, the prose does too, and the most exciting scenes are the ones that are the densest in terms of imagery. An example from a confrontation near the book's end:

[W]e pushed sideways, backwards, down, closed our eyes and twisted our fingers towards the great piles of discarded junk, remembering the smell of it, the rusted touch, the slime, the rot, the stink, the decay, the dead cat in its cardboard box, the fungus oozing over rotted things, the torn stuffing, the biting wire, the razored shattered edges, the tumbled glass, the melted plastic, the burnt steel, the everything. Everything we didn't want to see and didn't want to know, thrown aside; didn't care, didn't think, didn't need, didn't use, didn't work tossed and discarded and abandoned and forgotten and alone (p. 333).

This style of description via intentional excess, through what can frequently amount to genuine lists of detail, serves to first awe the reader and then overawe them. But while it is obviously far too much, it is gloriously too much. Griffin's verbosity doesn't serve to blur the picture but rather enhance it; London, here, doesn't become indistinct but rather a kind of blinding hyper-vivid that is hard to bear and hard to look at with one's eyes open but is endlessly rewarding once one grasps the trick of being born along by the flow of the words.

It is important, as well, to realize that, while Griffin certainly has a massive quantity of descriptions, she does not go for quantity over quality; she simply has a great, great deal of both. Instead of giving us one, as a writing instructor I've had would call it, surprising and significant detail, Griffin gives us ten, but each one is no less well chosen because of it. It's just that Griffin sees a dozen fascinating things about each scene, and she will not rest until we see them too. The reader that pauses and breaks down her lists into their component parts will see the craftsmanship that went into each link in the descriptive chain, and there are moments when Griffin does manage simple statements of understated and restrained poetry, such as when the day's end is described thus: Evening asked night if it was free for coffee (p. 284). She is also capable of humor and wit: Cynics call it fate, romantics call it destiny, lawyers call it malign intent. No one uses the word "coincidence." (p. 8)

And then there's the fact, though her exuberant style is just about the exact opposite of a restrained ghost story writer like Algernon Blackwood (who did, lest we forget, have a psychic detective of his own) or a noir writer like Raymond Chandler (whose Philip Marlowe is referenced on page 148), Griffin nonetheless does manage to give birth to a city dripping in fiery atmosphere and with myths that come to life. The Death of Cities is a character whose every action and approach is filled with an almost incalculable amount of dread and malice, and the hushed tales of his coming have a horrifying beauty to them, for, as Griffin says we all know and will not admit, a bomb going off [is] secretly, obscenely, immorally, indefinably, beautiful. (p. 405) To give just one example of these rumors about the Death of Cities:

Your hear stories. Stuff like… when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there was a house right in the middle of the blast, at its very heart, untouched while the rest of the city was leveled. They say that there was a man in the house, who had his face turned towards the sky as the bomb fell and who just smiled and smiled and didn't even close his eyes. (p. 228)

Urban sorcery is not just a clever magic system.  As Griffin says, [Magic is]a way of seeing things differently (p. 163), and her magic is a way of bringing to life the fabric of our cities and times. A Madness of Angels, distilled into one sentence, would be "magic is life." The Midnight Mayor does not simply wallow in the ground covered by its predecessor but rather subsumes A Madness of Angel's truths into it and then delves deeper, reversing the equation into life is magic (p. 151) and then discovering why.

The Midnight Mayor looks at what makes a city a city, at how people shape each other, and at whether it is the inanimate city that shapes its citizens or its citizens that shape the city. It is fascinating stuff, and the pages in which it is discussed in concentrated form towards the book's end manage to be both philosophical and to never break from the character or narrative established; these big questions are woven into the fabric of the story. Eventually, there comes forth the idea of the city –and, by extension, its denizens – as itself/themselves forming a "higher power" (p. 298).

The Midnight Mayor is the very blueprint of how to do a sequel. It is bigger and better than its predecessor, deeper in its explorations of genuine questions, more exciting, not only maintaining the first book's mystery but adding to it, and genuinely dripping with intoxicating flash and atmosphere. It's damn great.

Breaking New Ground: A Madness of Angels

[This is a Breaking New Ground post, and you should probably read the review first.]

A Madness of Angels, despite its flaws, was a really interesting book that had absolutely none of the flaws I was worried about Urban Fantasy having in spades. There was no (seriously worn) leather in it, there was no romance, and, while there was ass kicking, it certainly didn’t revolve around the werewolf/vampire/whatever dynamic that I was dreading that I would find. In fact, I found Kate Griffin’s London to be a wondrous and enchanting place, and I’m looking forward to getting back there as soon as I can in the already released sequel, The Midnight Mayor.

Oddly enough, though, I’m still as worried about Urban Fantasy as a whole as I was before I read the book. Yeah, it was good, but it wasn’t so much typical Urban Fantasy done well as atypical Urban Fantasy, at least if one defines Urban Fantasy as I (sort of) did for this challenge. Obviously this is far from the only atypical Urban Fantasy book out there, probably far from the most atypical one as well, but I’m still not reassured that I’ll be okay with most Urban Fantasy. Ah well, I guess I’ll have to overcome my fears and start the second book of the challenge.

If you’re on the fence about Urban Fantasy in general, I’d recommend giving A Madness of Angels a try anyway. Odds are, it will surprise you.

Kate Griffin - A Madness of Angels

"We be light, we be life, we be fire! We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven! Come be we and be free! We be blue electric angels!"

Fantasy’s a genre that yearns for the past, and your standard sources of magic include long forgotten ancient deities, long forgotten languages, and long lost artifacts, all generally found while escaping the dreary, wonderless, soul crushing nature of the modern world. A Madness of Angels doesn’t do any of that. The otherworldly setting in which we are immersed is nothing but everyday London, and sorcerers summon piping from the walls instead of chains of celestial energy. Kate Griffin doesn’t use reality as something to be escaped; she has, instead, found the wonder in every street corner of our everyday lives.

London is omnipresent in the narrative. We are told that the lifeblood of sorcery is the feeling and movement of the city itself, and the story pulsates with the rhythms of the city. The oddities and intricacies of urban life are perfectly rendered here, yet so bizarre as to be almost unrecognizable, while the magic flows from every pore of the landscape around it and feels like such a part of city life that you’ll probably find yourself looking for it next time you’re on the bus.

Griffin’s prose is well suited to the tale and to the city that surrounds it. This is a book of little things, and atmosphere is built with a menagerie of details:

The lift was clear glass, on the outer wall of the building, so I could see the city drop away beneath me. As on the London Eye that night, I was astounded by the beauty of its multicolored spectrum: not just the sodium orange of the suburban sprawl, but the white interiors of office blocks, green traffic lights, red aircraft beacons on the taller towers, purple floodlights washing over high walls, pooling beams of silver on enclosed courtyards, shimmering blues on fountains, or in the doors of clubs, the moving snakes of traffic, defined only by headlights, brakes, or indicators flashing on and off like an endless slithering column of eyes, and the reflected pinkish glare across the ceiling of the sky, except for where an aircraft’s guiding light sent out a cone of brightness, through the black scudding clouds heavy with rain as the wind carried them toward the sea. (p. 134)

The worldbuilding, and our grasp of it, is well balanced throughout the novel, something all the more remarkable because it’s the first in a longer series. This falls more to the wondrous side of the magical spectrum, rather than the heavily rule based, and the occasional explanation does take the form of: “Are you really going to ask such inane questions all the time? Mystic bloody forces, just accept them and cope!” (p. 283) All the same, magic is never used cheaply or incomprehensibly here, and, though we never know the true intricacies of the system, we soon know enough to understand the mechanics of the supernatural duels and confrontations and can even try to predict the character’s tricks, rather than just being along for a flashy but incomprehensible ride.

The opening scenes here are similar to your standard gosh, it’s a magic world! introduction…with the slight exception that the main character is not only aware of the world, not only knowledgeable about how it works, but just so happens to be ferociously competent in it. That character’s head – Mathew Swift’s, to be precise – is a very interesting place to be, in large part because it’s such a confused one. As the book begins, Swift is resurrected, after being deceased for two years. Swift isn’t the only thing that comes back, though. The electric blue angels of the telephone wires come too, and their myriad, flamboyant, and innocent consciousness is great when it is – quite literally – splitting headspace and narrative duties with Swift. The angel’s naivety, and their lack of knowledge as to what it means to be, well, human, leads to some of the novel’s best moments:

We were not exactly surprised; nevertheless I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how, exactly, I should behave. So we did nothing, waited to see if an emotion would strike, curious how we would respond to such news, whether we cry, or shouted or became angry or felt nothing at all. We hoped we would cry; it was the most human response. My eyes remained firmly dry, my mouth empty of any words. (p. 51)

Mathew Swift’s mind is a logical one, so his war against the Tower takes the form of individual acts of destabilization. Instead of going for the agency as a whole, he targets the Tower’s four lieutenants, planning to leave Bakker, the leader, defenseless and alone. Each of these mini quests is fully realized and engrossing. The lieutenants are menacing and interesting enough to function as great villains, and Griffin uses the one-thing-at-a-time nature of Swift’s plot to explore the world of her creation, from magical gladiators, to graffiti-guarded and bomb proof installations, and to phantom subway cars. The battles between Swift and his adversaries, particularly San Khay, were gripping and, most of all, ingenious in their use of the magic system.

And yet, the lieutenants alone never quite add up to a convincing Tower. When compared with the organizations that it’s trying to destroy, or the rest of the city, or even its own sub agencies, the Tower is woefully underdeveloped. Now, it could be argued that the entire novel is an exercise in using the parts to illustrate the whole (magical creatures are, after all, described by their ordinary building blocks), but the Tower fundamentally doesn’t fit into that system, because it’s standing in direct opposition to it. The Tower is all about centralizing magic, uniting all those disparate magicians and warlocks and sorcerers into one system, but the Tower itself feels as loose as anything it’s trying to destroy, just a collection of seemingly redundant agencies with an absolutely clueless figurehead on top.

The Tower’s leader, Bakker, is decently fleshed out as a character, but why he established the Tower, how he did it, why he believes it’s a force for good…none of these things are ever mentioned. The Tower is simply there, and it simply needs to be destroyed. Because. So, while the quest for that end is filled with interesting events, it’s hard to really throw yourself behind the journey without really caring a whit about the Tower itself and without ever seeing the characters really question the rightness of their actions.

Everything leaps into a sharper, more immediate focus when Hunger, a malevolent creature made of shadow that stalks Swift and is obsessed with experiencing life at all costs, comes on stage. The contrast between Hunger and the angels is a very interesting one. Hunger perpetually yearns for life and tries to learn and live by cataloging and consuming the blood and the chemistry of the living, attempting to build a whole out of the details of treasured possessions. The angels, on the other hand, live in a state of never ending joy, insatiable in their desire for media and new experiences, but strangely uninterested in the generalities of humanity or interaction, leading to a Swift that views all of his relationships with a degree of naïve perplexity. Unfortunately, Hunger’s strengths are dulled with repetition, and he’s lost some of his impact by the novel’s conclusion. The revelations about his identity and creation, slowly doled out throughout the climax, are also far easier to piece together dozens of pages before they’re given than they should be.

Getting into the home stretch of A Madness of Angels, I’ll admit that I was distinctly worried. As part one of a series, the book seemed poised to have the major villain dash off into the night so we could repeat the entire exercise again. I needn’t have worried. This is, as far as I’m concerned, exactly how book one of a series should end. The world is more than interesting enough that I want to go back to it, but there’s no missing crucial plot point that makes me think I’ve only gotten half the book.

The prose that is so good at describing the city at large occasionally runs into problems with action. The more supernatural confrontations flow very well, often, but when more traditional combat begins, wordiness can sap the urgency of the events:

“Duck!”

I ducked. I can respect formidable magical talent when I see it, and Old Madam Dorie, the old lady who smelt of curry powder and car fumes, had it in spades. She exuded skillful manipulation of primal forces just like her bags gave off the smell of mold, and if she’d said hop, I would have hopped. She, like my gran, had the look of a woman who talked to pigeons; and in the city, no one sees more than the pigeons.

I ducked, which is why the bullet from the sniper rifle…(p. 84-85)

It is, after all, hard to really get your blood up while you’re musing on exactly why you bothered to duck the sniper’s bullet.

A Madness of Angels’s flaws are all significant, and they prevent me from hailing the book itself as truly great. What was good about it, however, was more than enough to convince me that Kate Griffin was an absolute must read author. A Madness of Angels alternates between an engrossing gallop and a stuttering walk, but the book’s strengths carry it over the finish line with ease. I went into New York City a few days ago (London, sadly, was a bit too far) and walked around. As I did, I felt like I was viewing the same blocks through different eyes, the crushes of people and the roaring of the subways and the towering buildings infused with new life, all a change of perspective away. Are you interested in seeing the same sights, just with a tad more dazzle and quite a bit more jaw dropping magic coursing through them?

FURTHER READING

Breaking New Ground: A Madness of Angels