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.