Book Review: The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

The City of Brass is a fantasy novel about a young woman from 18th century Cairo who is drawn into adventures among the Djinn. Specifically, Nahri is a con artist of sorts, with a mysterious knack for healing and a supernatural ability to understand every language she hears. One day, while performing an exorcist ceremony on a little girl, she inadvertently comes to the attention of a hostile Ifrit. From that moment on, her life will never be the same...

The novel has a promising start. Orphan girl (well, 20-year-old-woman) living in a slum, conning rich powerful people? Nice. Djinn and zombies / ghouls and a chase across continents with a powerful but haughty djinn knight called Dara? Great. That section of the novel is rather inspired by the romance genre, it has to be said. Finally, the City of Brass itself is an impressive setting.

However, the City of Brass is certainly no utopia. Through Ali, a prince trained to be a warrior and future Qaid (think Grand Vizier) and the other viewpoint character, we see that Daevabad is every bit as brutal as 18th century Cairo. Especially half breeds and their descendants, called Shafrit, are at the receiving end of oppression, exploitation, slavery and crime. Ali, a religious zealot, would like to improve the lot of the Shafrit, but this would be a betrayal of his father, the king's policies, and could end up costing his life.

Shafrit, however, are only one segment of society. Djinns are divided into tribes (races), and there is deep seated mistrust between them. So while we follow Nahri and Dara being chased around the world, we also see that their destination might not be the safe haven Nahri is hoping for...

There are many things to recommend City of Brass. The prose is good, Nahri is a likeable protagonist, the adventures are on a grand swashbuckling scale, and the setting that ranges from Egypt to India is pleasantly exotic to Western readers.

There are also things that I did not enjoy. As the story develops, more and more focus is on the rivalry, mistrust and hatred between two djinn tribes (the Daeva and the Qahtanis). We watch Ali forced into moral compromises, and gradually learn of Dara's past. Nahri, caught between different power factions in Daevabad, has to try and get by in a Game-of-Thrones-like city of intrigue, politicking and tribalness. None of which would be terrible, but once it became clear that the different djinn tribes, and virtually all characters, are deeply racist and bigoted about each other (and even more so about the Untermensch Shafrits), the story starts to develop an unpleasant aftertaste. By the time I finished reading, the only character who was still likeable was Nahri; everyone else is basically scum.

Top marks for the start, the setting, and the initial atmosphere. Alas, the fun is soon eroded as things get ever-more murky. The book starts out as joyously swashbuckling fantasy adventure and ends up a grimdark novel of hatred, rivalry and despair. That is not a destination I wished to get to, and I doubt I will want to read the rest of the trilogy.

Rating: 3.5/5

Review: Djinn City by Saad Hossain

Djinn City is an urban fantasy novel set in Dhaka, Bankgladesh, inspired by the Eastern mythology around djinn. As backgrounds for urban fantasy novels go, Bangladesh is not one I've seen used before, and I have a weak spot for stories about djinns, so I was quite excited to read the book.

It is the story of various members of the Khan Rahman family. Indelbed is a young boy whose father Kaikobad is a drunkard and a black sheep of the family. He lives in a mansion in a poor area of the city, and Indelbed grows up neglected and hungry most of the time. One day, just as the rest of his family start to take an interest in his education (his father kept him out of school), his entire life is turned upside down. He finds his father in a coma and djinn have put a price on his head.

Rais is Indelbed's older cousin. His father is an ambassador (what he is an ambassador to is hardly clear) and his mother, Juny, is a hard nosed, clever and ambitious woman. After Indelbed disappears, Rais eventually makes it his mission to find answers and, perhaps, Indelbed.

Kaikobad, the alcoholic, meanwhile, is a discorporated soul in a strange realm, where he can only watch an ancient historical war unfold...

Djinn City starts out the way many fantasy novels start: young kid discovers that magic is real, that he is in danger from a villain, and is cut adrift from his family or orphaned to start his adventurous quest. He even soon finds a half-crazy mysterious but wise mentor.

However, the book soon diverts onto different tracks. Time passes. Indelbed's journey is not one of delight and swashbuckling fun. Meanwhile, Rais, the young adult cousin, gets to have a much more traditional adventure, half detective story and half fantasy quest. However, Rais only succeeds because his mother does half the work for him, which is not exactly the orphaned-hero way of most heroic quests.

Djinn City never got boring. There's adventure and intrigue and enough magical stuff to keep the reader entertained. Dhaka as a setting is refreshingly different, but it does not seem to be a very charismatic city: it could be any city in India or Bangladesh.

The real heart of such novels is of course the magical stuff. Saad Hossain's djinn are an entertaining bunch, livening up the pages with their chaotic ways and charisma. No complaints here. However, it does jar a bit when the author tries to explain them scientifically (it's a pretty major plot strand). This simply fails: no matter how much effort is invested in describing djinn DNA and how they manipulate reality - they simply can't both be a single naturally evolved species and have the diversity of form that they do. While most are humanoid, one, for example, is a school of fish! 

Much to my surprise, the book is pretty cavalier about the wellbeing of its characters. It might start out like a fun little YA novel, but some of the events later on get a little Game Of Thrones-y with regards to trauma inflicted, to be honest. The story never quite goes where you think it will, and don't expect everything to be nicely resolved and closed off by the end. Not, on the whole, the fun little happy read you  might expect from the premise.


Rating: 3/5

Review: Pet Sematary by Stephen King

Pet Sematary is the first Stephen King novel I'd heard of. Its German title, "Friedhof der Kuscheltiere", lacks the child-like spelling of "sematary" and instead translates as "Cemetery of the cuddly animals" (not "pets" but actually the word used for teddy bears and other stuffed toys). Perhaps for that reason, it was a book that you'd see in a lot of kids' hands back when I went to school...

I'm not sure what kids got out of the book, to be honest. The story of Louis Creed and his family, moving into a house next to an old native burial ground somewhere in Maine, works best when it covers the sentiments and secret thoughts of a husband and father.

Louis, a doctor taking a new job as head of the campus medical service at a small university, is not exactly a protagonist that I would have had much in common with as a child, either. His children, in turn, are a toddler (Gage) and a primary school aged girl (Ellie) - both well below the age of teenagers reading this stuff. So basically, the attraction of the book is its title, and the promise of cuddly pets as a source of scares...

The book starts on the day Louis and co move into their mansion (it's one of those American houses that is clearly bigger than any normal house in Europe). Nerves are frayed, and Louis fantasizes about running away to Disneyland (Disneyland being a recurring theme in the book) and leaving his family and cat by the side of the road. Barely up the driveway, his new neighbour Judd Crandall pops over, just as the toddler got stung by a bee and the girl twisted her ankle and general mayhem reached its peak.

It's Judd who warns Louis that the road between their houses has been many a pet's undoing, and is a danger to children. And it's Judd who, some days later, takes the family on an outing to the Pet Sematary, where local children bury their beloved pets in a pattern of spiralling plots. But there is a deadfall (trees felled by a storm) at its edge, and Judd warns the family never to try and climb it...

Pet Sematary has the usual Stephen King tone, that somewhat chummy, drawling, narrative voice which lulls the reader like the movement of a slow but comfortable train on ancient railway tracks. It frequently hints at things to come, sometimes a chapter or two in advance, sometimes more than that. It keeps you reading even when not much is happening to Louis or his family. Some of the glimpses of the future don't quite fit with the ending, in my mind, so there's a bit of a sense of discontinuity.

To my mind, the novel is at its most engaging when King writes about the relationships between people, and their inner lives. It's at its most horrifying in a scene of mundane disaster. All the supernatural stuff, all the "horror" of the novel, is actually not exactly scary. Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination: I can find movies scary, and I can find myself scared at night when unidentified noises haunt the house or when walking alone in darkness, but books? Somehow, I rarely find books scary. Pet Sematary is no exception. If golf is a perfectly good walk ruined by that business with the sticks and balls, then King's horror novels are perfectly good mundane literary novels ruined by the horror bits.

It's readable enough, in that chummy Stephen King way. It's not quite the transgressive novel King seems to think it is in his introduction, but perhaps grown ups with children and families will react more strongly to it than I did.

Rating: 3/5

Book Review: One Way by S.J. Morden

One Way by S J Morden tells the story of Frank, a convict whose prison sentence long exceeds his life span. One day, a mysterious visitor makes him an offer he can't refuse: instead of spending the rest of his natural life in the prison he's in, he could be trained to go to Mars, and live out his life there, building the first Mars base. It's a one way ticket, and legally the Mars Base would count as prison, but at least his life would be filled once again with achievement...

One Way is a novel that is possibly being slightly mis-sold: the blurb sells it as a murder mystery on Mars, with a small handful of suspects. If you buy it expecting a blue collar Agatha Christie novel on Mars, you may be slightly disappointed: the bulk of the story takes place before the whodunnit begins. However, that's not a bad thing: the book earns its way to Mars, carefully building up the characters and the preparation before delivering a cracking space adventure that doesn't have to hide in the shadow of The Martian.

One Way is a great science fiction read. In fact, its science is barely fictional and mostly current, rather than futuristic. It's also a great adventure novel, a great thriller, with an all-too-believable central premise. If there is a flaw, it's that the thing it's sold for - the whodunnit - isn't all that mysterious, once that part of the plot kicks in.

It's hard not to compare One Way with The Martian, as it features the same phraseology (talk about "the hab", hydrazine, air locks) and some of the basic premise (staged deliveries to the surface of the planet before the astronauts arrive, a botanist growing food inside the hab, Mars rovers, small nuclear reactors, and sand storms), and a comparable sense of peril as Mars is a more hostile environment than our characters are quite ready for. However, One Way doesn't go down the humorous route in the way The Martian did, focusing instead on a tense interplay between characters who don't have much reason to trust or like each other. The Martian is a fundamentally optimistic novel about people working together against all odds, and a hero never losing his sense of humour as he faces one challenge at a time. The Martian has no villain. One Way is a much more grim-faced look at how Mars might be explored by the likes of Jeff Bezos, written in a time where optimism is thin on the ground and moral bankruptcy and corruption are dominating global news. In One Way, everyone is a villain and there are no heroes. It's the Trump era's answer to The Martian of the Obama era...

A cracking thriller, compelling and convincing.

Rating: 4.5/5