Review: The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch

The October Man is a short novel set in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London / Peter Grant contemporary fantasy universe. Only it's not set in London and Peter Grant isn't in it...

When I first heard that Ben Aaronovitch was writing a novel set in Germany, I thought that meant Peter Grant was going on a bigger outing. So far, he's been to London, London, London, rural Hereford and London. I didn't realise it was going to be a spin-off about people who know of Peter Grant (thanks largely to spy agencies), but who have not appeared in any of the previous novels in the series. So I was quite intrigued when, some pages in, I finally realised that this book was going to be something different.

Tobias Winter, our protagonist and first person narrator, is a young German police officer specialising in the supernatural. He is apprenticed to Germany's number one (and only) police wizard. In The October Man, he gets sent to Trier to solve a gruesome murder in the German wine-growing region around the Mosel river, with the help of a local policewoman.

If that premise sounds a little... familiar... then it's because Tobias Winter is the German Peter Grant. The setup of the German magic police might not include a building like the Folly, but apart from that, it feels very, very familiar. There is even an enthusiastic forensic coroner of magic corpses who helps the team, and there are Rivers to talk to...

Tobias Winter also has a very similar narrative voice to Peter Grant. He might not comment about architecture (although he does comment about the history  of places a lot), but apart from that, he has the same sense of humour and wit, the same way of observing things, the same approach to modern policing. His parents might not be into jazz, but Tobias has the same bemused affection for them that Peter has for his...

After the conclusion of the faceless man arc in London, I can see why it must have been tempting for the author to escape to a different angle for a bit. However, it feels a tad disappointing that the different angle turns out to be not that different after all.

The October Man is a curious novel: it's fun and readable and has most of the things you love about the Rivers of London series. Except for the cast. But it has a cast of equivalents instead...

Its biggest advantage turned out not to be the different setting, but the more compact list of characters. Peter Grant's universe has grown to include a big crew of friends, colleagues and recurring characters: at times, Lies Sleeping had felt like an exercise in story logistics akin to pulling the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe together into a tentpole ensemble story. The October Man goes back to basics and echoes Rivers of London more than any other Peter Grant novel since. Its biggest weakness is that it manages to feel weirdly derivative of its own series. It's worth reading and good fun, even so.

Rating: 3.5/5

Review: Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch

Lies Sleeping is the seventh novel in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. Chances are, if you like urban / contemporary fantasy, you will have given this series a try by now. If not: go out and buy Rivers of London right now. It's the first novel, and the beginning of the best urban fantasy series ever written.

Peter Grant is a Detective Inspector by now, having worked his way up from rookie (and apprentice wizard) to trusted professional (and ok wizard, though it seems his magical abilities have plateaued and aren't growing much between volumes). At this point in the series, the support cast includes dozens of people, including lots of policeman officers, extended families of Peter and the Rivers, several scientists / medics, and even a few others who are learning wizarding through officially sanctioned channels. So even though I've read every book, I struggled a bit to keep track of who's who. I may have to re-read the series in one go at some point.

One of the reasons the cast is so enormous is that this is the book of a major police operation, nicknamed "Operation Jennifer", with the aim of sorting out the Faceless Man problem once and for all. Meanwhile, Martin Chorley, the Faceless Man (an evil wizard) is busy, busy, busy, scheming to achieve some big objective that might change the world (or London) forevermore...

So far, the series has largely been alternating between "Faceless Man" novels (the even numbered ones) and "archetypal myth" novels (the odd numbered ones). I have consistently enjoyed the ones featuring some archetypal, atmospheric, folkloric style myths more. The Faceless Man could have been interesting, I guess, but after a big intro, his mystique fizzled out quickly. Now he's just plain Martin Chorley, bereft of charisma or mystique, and not really the creepy supervillain that he started out as. More powerful than Peter, but easily matched by Nightingale. So an odd-numbered novel about him felt a bit like it's cheating me out of one of the good ones. (They're all good, but the ones with little or no Faceless Man are simply better).

So, big police operation, Faceless Man, cast list of dozens... Lies Sleeping is not the most accessible novel. Anyone unfamiliar with the series won't find much to enjoy, and those familiar with it need a really good memory. On the bright side, Lesley is in this a lot, and her former place has been taken by Guleed, so Peter has a kick-ass female sidekick again, this time with a hijab, but otherwise very old-Lesley-like. Even better, we meet someone similar to Molly, and the sub plot around her is the best thing about the book (aside from a cameo by talking foxes). Despite those highlights, the book has the usual faceless-man-novel problem of being complicated, messy, and feeling a bit by-the-numbers, so it's not one of the highlights of the series. But this is the sort of series where even the weak entries are not bad.

Bring on the next one!

Rating: 3.5/5

Review: Snowflake by Heide Goody & Iain Grant

Snowflake is a comic fantasy novel about Lori, a young millennial woman who finds, upon returning from a holiday, that her parents have sold the house, moved out, and kicked her out in absentia. And then magic shit starts to happen...

As comic fantasy novel, Snowflake gently bumbles along as Lori flounders from one disaster to another, raising chuckles and smiles. Lori is an amiably inept protagonist, likeable because she is naive and silly. The story, meanwhile, is a bit bewildering. For a long time, the plot can't decide whether it's about Lori's troubles with adulting, or about the magic stuff that adds a different dimension of chaos. It tries to do both, but with the result that it feels like neither strand is driving the story forward.

"Snowflake" is a term used a lot these days, often in online flamewars. My understanding was different from the authors' - I thought it's a derogatory term about overly sensitive, overly PC people who go on about trigger warnings and safe spaces a lot. The authors seem to have interpreted it as a term about young millennials who don't grow up, don't move their life into the phases of job-marriage-housebuying-children that traditional adulthood expects, but who loiter somewhere in a post-uni limbo of living in houseshares or with their parents, halfheartedly chasing dreams but ignoring careers, having relationships but nothing too serious or long-term. Lori certainly never seems to have any strong opinion or any obsession with safe spaces, which was a bit of a relief.

Comic fantasy is a genre that lives in the shadow of Terry Pratchett. I remember trying to write like him back when I was a teenager, and the huge plethora of books that were touted as "the next Terry Pratchett" at the time. Snowflake is one of those books that reads like Pratchett-light. It's amusing, but not a substitute for the master.

Rating: 3/5

Review: Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea

I happened to spot a copy of Girls of Riyadh in Hoffi Coffi, on a booksharing shelf. The title intrigued me, so I downloaded a Kindle copy (the paperback is still on the shelf in Hoffi Coffi if you want it!)

Girls of Riyadh is a novel showing a side of Saudi Arabian life that people like me, a man who has never been there, will be completely unfamiliar with. It has been described as "Sex and the City in Saudi Arabia" which, along with the title and cover, should give you a hint about its topic matter. Saudi chick-lit, written by a Saudi woman writer - who'd have thought?

The book is told in a series of posts. In any other place, they might be blog posts, but here, they are delivered as email messages to a newsgroup. Communication in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s appears to be about 15 years behind communication in Europe - who still remembers the age of newsgroups? The author of the mailouts is an anonymous young woman, who prefaces each post with a little message to her readers, initially announcing her grand plan to shake things up a bit and later responding to reactions to her messages. Inside this frame (which sounds more complicated than it is), she tells the stories of four young women trying to navigate the tricky arena of dating, sex and marriage in the most sexually repressed country on Earth.

It should be said that the narrator and her friends all belong to the same class - well-off, part of the "in crowd", and with all the privileges of being upper class in a fairly rigid society. Not royalty, but wealthy and urbane. As they are not allowed to drive (the book was written a decade before this week's long-overdue royal decree allowing women to drive cars), they all have chauffeurs at their behests. The chauffeurs are virtually nameless in the book - they are obviously so far beneath our heroines that they need not be acknowledged or considered at all.

Class is important because it's pretty clear that these young women are more privileged than most. The ultra-strict laws might apply, but they never have any real terror of being caught when breaking them, because they know that they'll not get into huge trouble if they do. So, in one of the first scenes, they all decide that they want to have the most unique, trendsetting hen do for the first of them to get married that ever has been arranged in Riyadh. That means hiring a DJ and having a girls' disco and dressing up at home (apparently the standard approach) is out of the question. Instead, they decide to go the shopping mall & about town without being chaperoned by their families. One of them dresses as a boy (so she can pretend to be their younger brother), and with the help of their silent chauffeur, they go out on their adventure.

Of course, the escapades that are possible in Saudi Arabia, even for pampered wealthy girls, are comparatively tame. Exchanging mobile numbers (through car door windows) and texting with boys (or chatting online, or, if really interested, phoning) is about as far as it goes, before engagements & marriage. (The process of getting married in Saudi, meanwhile, is also something I learned a lot about through this book) But, having grown up on teen movies like Clueless, it's equally clear that these girls dream of leading less restricted - though not liberal - lives. They want to be cool, fashionable, flirtatious, desirable, and able to have fun. They yearn for drama (which means they gossip about the smallest details and spend a lot of time being overdramatic), but most of all, they yearn for something their society perpetually withholds: respect and a kind of full adulthood.

Above all else, Girls of Riyadh is a critique of Saudi culture - and Saudi men in particular. No wonder it caused a bit of a stir over there when it was published. The four women go through ups and downs, but again and again they find that the environment they live in is out to judge them, and that men are looking not for women to love, but for women to control. In the book, Saudi men all have very clear expectations of women, but won't communicate those, and then judge women very harshly if they in any way behave differently (not worse, merely differently) compared to those expectations. In short, Saudi Arabia has created a culture where relationships and love have become perverted and corrupted, making it near-impossible for people to find happiness and love, if GoR is an accurate portrayal.

The book has a serious undertone, but is written as chick lit, so it is accessible, tongue in cheek, playful, and generally light entertainment. It doesn't just criticise - it also highlights the humanity and the many ways in which young people navigate around the social minefield they find themselves trapped in.

I'd highly recommend Girls of Riyadh for getting a flavour of an experience that will be quite alien to most readers in the West / Global North. It's also a pleasant book to read.

Rating: 4/5

PS: My only other exposure to Saudi Arabia-set novels is Zoe Ferraris' excellent trilogy of detective novels. Girls of Riyadh complements those novels quite well (or vice versa), as the trilogy is set in Jeddah (apparently a more relaxed city than Riyadh, if GoR is to be believed) but in a lower class (its heroes have proper day jobs, not as luxuries, but because they need to work). In some ways, that means Zoe Ferraris' characters are more restricted (they fear genuine and harsh consequences from the judicial system if caught transgressing in any way), while in others, they are freer (they have smaller networks of family & peers ready to judge and shun them). Zoe Ferraris' novels give a fuller picture of everyday life and its problems, while Girls of Riyadh shows a more privileged perspective by putting a spotlight on Saudi Fairly-High Society. The characters in Girls of Riyadh are more likely to end up as murder victims or perpetrators to be investigated by Zoe Ferraris' characters, while Zoe Ferraris characters would be pretty much invisible to the high flying, occasionally globetrotting Girls of Riyadh...