Fly By Night, Frances Hardinge

I came across this book as a result of picking up its sequel, Twilight Robbery, at an otherwise uninspiring discount book shop in South Africa. I loved the sequel so much that I immediately tracked down Fly By Night, which I think is one of my most favourite books ever. I later discovered that Frances Hardinge, the author, had been a student at Somerville College, and all her books are actually in the library, so I could have read them both for free. But that’s another story.

Fly By Night tells of the adventures of Mosca Mye, named for Goodman Palpitattle, ‘He Who Keeps Flies out of Jams and Butterchurns’. Mosca is the daughter of deceased revolutionary Quillam Mye, who has done her a great disservice by teaching her how to read, and naming her after the common Housefly. Mosca lives in the perpetually drenched village of Chough, which can be found ‘by straying as far as possible from anywhere comfortable or significant, and following the smell of damp’.

The story opens with Mosca’s decision to escape Chough, along with her trusty homicidal goose Saracen. On her way out, Mosca sets fire to a mill, and rescues the amoral but articulate Eponymous Clent, who has been put in the stocks for fraud. Together, they make their way to the City of Mandelion, where they proceed to cause all kinds of trouble.

The chapters are charmingly titled alphabetically, beginning with ‘A is for Arson’ and ‘B is for Blackmailing’, going through other criminal offences including ‘M is for Murder’, finally arriving at ‘R is for Redemption’, and ending with ‘V is for Verdict’. Mosca and Clent become involved in a complex series of political upheavals involving the Duke of Mandelion, Vocado Avourlace, and his sister the Lady Tamarind, as well as assorted revolutionaries and religious fanatics, and a girl who refers to herself as Cakes.

The City of Mandelion is in the Fractured Realm, a sort of parallel of 18th-Century England that incorporates some elements of Romanian tradition. The Realm is Fractured because there is no clear successor to the king who was decapitated some time before, so each City supports their Monarch-of-Choice, and life in general is controlled by the Guilds. The Guild of Stationers is in control of all books, while the Guild of Locksmiths aspires to be in charge of everything.

In Fly By Night, names are of great significance, as each person is named for the ‘Beloved’, the religious personages of the Fractured Realm, who presides over the hour of their birth. It is assumed, therefore, that the name of a person to some extent reflects their character. Mosca often laments her attachment to Palpitattle, but also looks to him for guidance in her times of need.

Fly By Night is a book about identity, belief and loyalty, as well as the role of intellectuals in a functional society, examined through the story of one angry girl, her homicidal goose, and her quest to find a place where she belongs. It is also a well-paced and exceptionally funny murder mystery set in a mock-18th century England. I loved both sides.

The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente

This is the story of September Morning Bell, who leaves her boring life in Omaha which is mainly characterised by loneliness and washing dishes, and flies away to fairyland with the Green Wind and the Leopard of Little Breezes. As they fly away from Omaha, September doesn’t look back or wave goodbye. The narrator explains that this is because ‘all children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That’s why it takes so long to grow one’. To some extent, this is a story about how September grew a heart.

The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland is a traditional quest story: September is drawn into the struggle between the denizens of Fairyland and the Marquess, who has gone power crazy and invented bureaucracy. Initially, she sets off on a quest to retrieve a magic spoon belonging to the witch Goodbye from the Marquess who has stolen it, which leads to a quest to find a magic sword in the Worsted Wood. September stands up to the Marquess, and is able to restore the normal order of things to Fairyland. In the process, she makes some true friends, and discovers the real value of the home she has left behind.

Fairyland itself is beautifully evoked and endearingly quirky: there is a herd of wild bicycles, a city made entirely of cloth, and a gaol at the bottom of the world. The Marquess’s hair changes colour to suit her mood, and she wears a very fine hat.

September’s friends include the Leopard and Green Wind from the opening, a Marid named Saturday , and a Wyvern who believes that his father was a Library, so he calls himself a Wyverary. There are also several animated objects, including a green jacket, a key and a lamp, and a soap golem named Lye. The inhabitants of Fairyland oscillate between being wondrous and creepy, making September’s adventure somewhat reminiscent of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In particular, September’s encounter with an island full of abandoned things that also happen to be alive is both funny and almost terminally exciting.

Although the book is light and often tongue-in-cheek, there is a serious undertone. September’s father has been conscripted and sent to war in Europe, and her mother has started working at a factory making aeroplane engines. September’s feelings of abandonment constantly reappear in the narrative, giving the book a poignant edge one wouldn’t necessarily expect in this type of modern-day fairytale. Indeed, there is one particularly gruesome moment during Septembers’ circumnavigation of Fairyland in which she is forced to catch, kill and gut a pink fish with emerald eyes in order to survive her trip. This is followed by a conversation with a shark about whether or not fish are meant to be eaten, which provides some degree of closure, strangely enough. But the fishing scene is still rather emotional, and really quite disturbing.

The ending is neat, but not so perfect that it discounts the possibility of a sequel – in fact, the sequel is already out, and is called The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There.

Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch

Rivers of London is a good old traditional police procedural set, as the title suggests, in London. But this is a London where ghosts are real, magic is an actual thing, and the rivers are populated by very independent-minded and often cantankerous gods. The structure is supplied in chief by the police procedural genre, and events are narrated in the first person by PC Peter Grant, a true Londoner with a dry wit. The plot is built on a nexus of myths and legends about the London area, cleverly updated to fit this magical vision of the present day. The novel is part of a series focused on the career of Peter Grant, which at this point includes two more books, Moon over Soho and Whispers Underground.

PC Grant is about to qualify as a police officer, and is determinedly trying to avoid being assigned to an office job in the Case Progression Unit. He is also trying to seduce his colleague, Lesley May, with equal determination. On the morning of his career progression interview, he is pulled out of bed early to guard the perimeter of a crime scene. The body of a man has been discovered by another, very drunk man, so a murder investigation is under way. Once everyone has left the scene, Grant is approached by someone claiming to have witnessed the crime. Only the witness happens to be dead himself. Faced with the ghost, Grant reasons ‘just because you’ve gone mad, doesn’t mean you should stop acting like a policeman’, and decides to pursue the ghost lead in the hope that it might help him avoid the Case Progression Unit.

This brings him to the attention of Thomas Nightingale, the tall, dapper last wizard in England, who takes Grant on as the first apprentice wizard in fifty years. Together, they proceed to investigate the supernatural aspects of the case, which seem to centre on the legend of Mr Punch. Through the investigation, Grant comes to meet the goddess of the river Thames and all her daughters, as well as a motley cast of citizens of London and members of the Metropolitan Police.

The novel is carried by Grant’s likeable character and amusing commentary on London in general and the Metropolitan Police in particular. The use of myth and legend is tasteful and elegant, lending depth to the narrative but not requiring any previous knowledge of the city or its myths for the novel to be appreciated. But what I liked best about it is that it is unashamedly funny, and it does not resort to caricature to achieve this humour. Grant’s wry observations about London, police work and humanity in general invariably made me smile, and occasionally even laugh aloud. At the same time, the plot is brilliantly paced, so that it is actually very difficult to put the book down.

This is one of the books I enjoyed most this year. In addition to the self-contained plot of the murder mystery, there is also a longer story arc that extends through the series, with Leslie May, Peter Grant and Thomas Nightingale at its centre, and it is highly addictive. So while I thoroughly recommend this book, I would advise against buying all three at the same time, since that would probably result in a suspension of real-life concerns until you reach the end of the third one, which would probably turn out to be a bad thing in the long run.

Ribblestrop, Andy Mulligan

Ribblestrop tells the story of a new boarding school, which is set up by the idealistic Dr Giles Norcross-Webb, with the assistance of Captain Routon, the ex-military PE teacher, and Professor Clarissa Worthington, scientist-in-residence.

Action begins in the style of Harry Potter, with the main characters meeting on the train to school. Sam is eagerly anticipating his first term at Ribblestrop, and is happy to make his first friend on the train: Ruskin. Ruskin introduces Sam to the spirit of Ribblestrop: ‘Dr Norcross-Webb says we’re pioneers, like in the Wild West. We can do anything and everything, if we put our minds to it.’ He also introduces Sam to the real condition of the school: it has hardly any pupils and no roof, and there is a South American pupil called Sanchez who is in hiding from kidnappers and keeps a gun under his bed.

After an accident involving a flask of tea and Sam’s shorts and ‘tender regions’, the two boys run into Millie: the first Ribblestrop girl. Through a combination of Ruskin’s carelessness and Millie’s ill-advised advice, Sam ends up with no shorts, and all three children end up off the train and on the run. Millie’s resourcefulness and lack of aversion to mildly criminal activity is instrumental in getting them to Ribblestrop, and as an added bonus they run into Sanchez on the way, only causing one shoot-out, which is followed by a rather good meal with Champagne all round. Upon arrival at Ribblestrop, they discover that a group of orphan boys from overseas have been given scholarships, so now Ribblestrop has enough students to start its own football team, news which is greeted with much excitement.

The term begins with project to rebuild the school’s roof after the previous year’s fire, set by the now-expelled Miles. At the same time, Captain Routon assembles a football team for the first time in Ribblestrop’s short history, and invites the local High School for a match, which causes the headmaster to lead a prayer requesting guidance in ball-control. But while the children are busy learning about engineering and construction and practicing team-play in football, there is a nefarious plot unfolding in the underground tunnels under Ribblestrop Towers, and Lady Vyner is hatching a plot against the school.

This is unusually gritty for a children’s book. Characters get genuinely hurt, and the villains are genuinely dangerous. But it maintains one of the most significant elements of the genre of Children’s adventure story, in that the adults are only tangentially related to the resolution of the plot, if they have any connection to it at all. Dr Norcross-Webb sails through the term’s calamities on a sea of calm oblivion, armoured with the belief that if he trusts his pupils they will grow both academically and personally, and the school will be a great success. Oddly enough, his approach seems to work: although the children occasionally behave appallingly, and participate in activities that are not only against school rules, but also against the law, they share a deep love for Ribblestrop and for each other, which motivates them to work as a team and save their school and themselves.

This is a satire of the traditional boarding school novel with a warm heart and a great sense of humour. There is rather a lot of drinking and gun-toting for a school novel, but there is nevertheless a strong moral compass at its core, and the children are still credibly childlike. Ribblestrop may not be the sort of school you would want to send your child to, but you’ll definitely wish you had gone there yourself.

The Painted Man, Peter V. Brett

In this world, demons come out every night, rising through the ground from the core of the earth, and they will rip you to pieces and eat your bits unless you hide behind protective wards.

The setting is a cross between the mock-medieval universe familiar from many fantasy novels, and a study of backward, closed communities. Hardly anybody travels, because the demons eat you if you stay out at night, unless you have a ‘portable circle’, made of pieces of wood or ceramic with wards on them. But you have to know how to lay out this circle appropriately so that the demons can’t find any weakness in the imaginary protective net through which they could barge in and gleefully nom you. The people who travel are called Messengers, because they carry messages, as well as everything else that ever travels. They are usually accompanied by a ‘Jongleur’, a fool in motley, who plays music and tells stories, and constitutes the only manifestation of culture in the outlying hamlets. The central premise of the plot is that humankind is going to be eradicated by demons because the knowledge of old has been lost, and people have become uneducated and unable to communicate with each other. Also, they are crippled by fear of the demons and a lack of creativity when it comes to dealing with them.

Our hero is a man named Arlen. Similar to The Name of the Wind, the story begins with Arlen as a boy, describing how he is made exceptional by a traumatic experience: his mother is mauled by a demon, his father doesn’t try to save her, and then daddy goes off and marries a younger woman. Arlen takes this personally, so he runs away from home. Conveniently, he has a unique talent for painting wards, so he survives by scraping wards into the mud. (Wards are a bit like maths or language, in that they must be lined up in some sort of order for them to make a protective net, and different combinations have different degrees of effectiveness, therefore some people are better at ‘warding’ than others.) Unfortunately, he is a young hothead, so he baits the demons that are trying to get into his circle, and ends up getting scratched by a rather large one, and then chopping off its arm. The demon takes that extremely personally (as one would), and proceeds to pursue Arlen relentlessly for the rest of the novel. Arlen, meanwhile, gets himself attached to a Messenger and a Warder, and becomes an extremely accomplished, if mentally unstable, young individual.

In addition to Arlen, there are two more pov characters in The Painted Man: Leesha, who accidentally becomes the world’s best ‘herb gatherer’ (i.e. healer), and Rojer, improbably the world’s best Jongleur, who had part of his right hand eaten by a demon when he was little. These two are the sidekicks Arlen requires in order to save the world, but as this is a trilogy, don’t hold your breath. By the end of book one, the central characters have all more-or-less met, but that’s about it.

The plot of the novel is propelled by travel, which is perhaps not surprising, as the characters are unique precisely because they travel. Leesha goes to a city far from home to be apprenticed to a master-healer (and to avoid trouble at home), Rojer travels the countryside as a Jongleur spreading songs and stories and sleeping with other people’s wives (he is young but precocious) and Arlen crosses the desert for an Orientalist sojourn in distant Krassia, where the men fight the demons every night, and he learns about bravery and demon-fighting strategies. By the end of the novel, our heroes’ paths have converged, and there is a satisfying final battle which sets things up nicely for the sequel, The Desert Spear.

Overall, it is a fun, absorbing read, with strong characters and a good sense of poetic justice. There are a few graphic sex scenes, and the ocassional instance of gruesome violence and blood all over the place, but nothing too strong for my delicate constitution, so you'll probably be alright. I thouroughly recommend it.

The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

This was recommended to me by a friend.

The Name of the Wind is a mix between High Fantasy in the tradition of Tolkien, and mock-Medieval fiction (ie Tolkien without the elves etc).

The main character is a likely lad named Kvothe, who deals admirably with the trials of his youth, which include extreme bereavement and homelessness, by becoming the Medieval equivalent of a Guitar God (only he plays the lute, because that is more realistic). As lead characters go he is actually extremely likeable, although he does have an annoying tendency to be too good at things. For example, in addition to his status as Lute-god, he is also unimaginably good at magic. It is occasionally difficult to believe he could have so many issues with life if he is really that much better at everything than his peers.

The Name of the Wind is the first book in a trilogy featuring the inimitable Kvothe. The novel covers Kvothe's childhood and entrance into the University, where he wants to learn, as I'm sure you can guess, 'the name of the wind'. The narrative is cleverly framed by passages describing Kvothe as a grown man of indeterminate age, who has become an inkeeper, and is telling his story to The Chronicler. Consequently, although the narrative of Kvothe's youth has a largely satisfactory ending, the framing tempts the reader to try and guess how he has ended up there, and why it's such a big deal that he has.

Overall, it is a well-plotted novel with wonderful imagery and interesting characters. It is, however, a bit long for the amount of plot it contains. But that just means you get to follow Kvothe around for a little longer...