Skip to main content

Book review: The Bartimaeus Trilogy

Well, I didn't actually read this one, I listened to it. Audiobooks are fantastic, and I think often improve my comprehension of the work. Best to do them both if one wants to get the most out of an important work like Blood Meridian (also great to listen to), but I didn't have the text in this case.

Back to business. The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud, would probably be dismissively shunted into young-adult fantasy by a douchebag like Harold Bloom, but though the main human characters are young (Bartimaeus, on the other hand, is more than 5000 years old), I thought the themes mature and deep. More than worth reading if you're not too pretentious.

The story is an alternate history, where human magicians and spirits (the spirits live on a different plane of existence called The Other Place) rule the earth in a series of large empires. The magicians enslave the spirits by means of incantations, pentacles and runes, and force them to work magic. All the magicians power comes from these spirits, humans themselves are incapable of using magic. Historical kingdoms like Egypt, Rome and Carthage were societies like this.

Bartimaeus is a spirit of middling power, first summoned by a young magician called Nathaniel. The characterization of Bartimaeus is absolutely splendid; he's vain, wry, sarcastic, and hilarious, often going on long digressions on emperors or powerful magicians he served in the past.

Nathaniel is an idealistic young English boy who is quickly sucked into the machinations, backstabbery and politics of the English government (as the British Empire is the dominant empire of the moment). This is another of the book's strengths--the view of human nature and history, which is bleak, jaded, and cynical. He depicts the series of empires as inevitably mistreating their non-magician citizens (called commoners in England), who develop resistance to the magic and overthrow the government. A few generations later, another empire develops in a different part of the world. I detected a strain of the old Marxist historical process in this, with the inevitability of it all.

Another of the main characters is the more sympathetic Kitty Jones, who is a commoner bent on overthrowing the government, to be replaced with the old democratic parliament. She eventually develops a friendship with Bartimaeus.

Stroud wisely avoids too much political commentary about the situation and sticks mostly to the action, which is well-told. All throughout the voice of Bartimaeus, subtle and refined, keeps the book's feet on the ground.

Lastly, the reader Simon Jones did a superb job, most especially capturing the wry tones of Bartimaeus. If you're looking for some splendid middlebrow novels this winter, these are highly recommended.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that