Nathaniel is a magician’s apprentice in modern London. In his England, magicians control everything: the Prime Minister is the most powerful, and the rest of the government is made up of other magicians, all constantly jockeying for power and full of contempt for “commoners” (ie., everyone else). What the commoners don’t know is that magicians don’t actually do magic. Their only power lies in memorizing endless rituals and incantations for summoning demons and forcing them to do the magicians’ bidding.
Anyway, Nathaniel is eleven, supposedly not ready to summon even the lowliest of demons — but of course he summons one anyway, a powerful (and entertainingly snarky) djinni named Bartimaeus, thus setting in motion a destructive chain of events.
Boy learning magic, corrupt government, scorn for non-magic-wielders… it will be impossible to review this book without comparing it to Harry Potter, so let’s get that out of the way right now. This is a very different book. It’s far darker, far more claustrophobic. Nathaniel leads an isolated life with no access to friends, in a world full of back-stabbing, cold adults — his magical training doesn’t save him from his misery, it causes it.
Even more notably, Nathaniel is a pretty unlikeable character. He’s so full of hubris that he can’t see the mistakes he makes, and can’t figure out any way to solve his problems other than to pile on more magic.* What’s more, none of this changes much by the end of the book. It’s a trilogy, so I imagine his emotional growth will be a continuing theme, but he’s starting from a much darker place than most YA fantasy protagonists.
The big win is Bartimaeus’s voice. The story is narrated in turn by Nathaniel and Bartimaeus, and what the former lacks in engaging personality, the latter makes up for and then some. Bartimaeus’s snide, world-weary tone — with footnotes! (man, I love footnotes) — made the book for me. Unfortunately, that meant that Nathaniel’s chapters were a harder slog. Maybe that’s partly because Nathaniel’s chapters are in the third person; not sure why Stroud made that decision, but it makes Nathaniel seem even less a match for Bartimaeus.
Also reviewed at She Reads Books and The Christian Fantasy Review.
*Thankfully with no drug metaphors, Buffy fans.
8 responses so far ↓
1 rebecca // Jan 13, 2009 at 9:56 pm
I liked this series in steadily increasing amounts. I liked book one only a medium amount; I liked book two more than that; and I loved book 3.
2 rebecca // Jan 13, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Also, I can’t write in parallel format. (One, two, 3? Buh.)
3 Martini-Corona // Jan 13, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Huh, I didn’t think of H-Pot at all. I immediately thought of the Golden Compass trilogy — isolated child in modern-but-alternate London, magic-based bureaucracy; nonhuman familiar. How does it stack up against that?
4 Sam // Jan 14, 2009 at 5:50 pm
M-C: Well, it’s similarly dark, but a *lot* less complex, and the world is less rich. Even by the end of Golden Compass, there was a lot going on, and I felt like I could see the world (even before the movie told me what it looked like — fortunately the filmmakers mostly agreed with my imagination). The 2nd and 3rd Bartimaeus books might get to that level of depth, but in this book there were really only 5 or 6 characters (most of them not noteworthy) and a few sets.
I remembered Golden Compass fondly for years after I read it, and recently even re-read it (which I hardly ever do anymore). I suspect Amulet of Samarkand will prove fun, but forgettable.
5 rebecca // Jan 14, 2009 at 6:11 pm
@M-C: His Dark Materials is a lastingly important series, breathlessly artistically rich and ideologically extremely deep (often conflictingly). It belongs on the canon lists. The Bartimaeus Trilogy reaches its deepest point in book three, and I won’t be forgetting it anytime soon, but it’s not at the peak of importance in the field (as HDM is).
6 The Book of Dead Days, by Marcus Sedgwick // Jan 27, 2009 at 11:40 am
[...] This reminded me a lot of the Bartimaeus books, as well as John Bellairs, though it’s less straightforward than either. I also kept having [...]
7 Visit from Jonathan Stroud! // Jan 27, 2009 at 2:52 pm
[...] I didn’t want to announce when I read the first Bartimaeus (because it was still in the works) was that I read it in preparation for a school visit from its [...]
8 The Bartimaeus Trilogy: The Golem’s Eye (bk. 2), by Jonathan Stroud // Mar 8, 2009 at 7:06 pm
[...] main gripe with the first Bartimaeus was how much Nathaniel’s chapters dragged as compared with Bartimaeus’s. The [...]
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