Clockwork Angel

Clockwork Angel is Cassandra Clare's latest YA offering; she's taken the basic plot and character types from her City of Bones/Ashes/Glass series and steampunk-ified them back into the Victorian era. The surprise is that it's still fun.

When Tessa, the main character of this one, tells Will, a Shadowhunter, that she loves to read books by Wilkie Collins, he observes that he's "never seen anyone get so excited over books before," and she asks "Isn't there anything you love like that? And don't say 'spats' or 'lawn tennis' or something silly" to which he replies "Good Lord...it's like she knows me already."

One character, a friend of Will's, seems to be very obviously dying of consumption, until it turns out that it's something else altogether which ails him. Another character tells Will and his fellow Shadowhunters about the threat posed by "mechanical monsters meant to destroy the ranks of Shadowhunters" and the "binding spell that would animate these creatures not with mechanics but with demonic energies." So it's Victorian England, only not quite.

I also particularly enjoyed the part where Will kills one of a pair of demons, only to find out later that "her sister brought her back via a necromantic charm."

And I relished the histrionic descriptions, like this one of the demons' lair:
"A great crystal chandelier hung overhead, fronded with strings of gray cobweb that drifted in the disturbed air like ancient lace curtains. It had probably once hung over a grand table. Now it swung over a bare marble floor that had been painted with a series of necromantic patterns--a five-pointed star inside a circle inside a square. Inside the pentagram stood a repulsive stone statue, the figure of some hideous demon, with twisted limbs and clawed hands. Horns rose from its head.
All around the room were scattered the remains of dark magic--bones and feathers and strips of skin, pools of blood that seemed to bubble like black champagne. There were empty cages lying on their sides, and a low table on which was spread an array of bloody knives and stone bowls filled with unpleasant dark liquids."

It makes me think of the "children catcher" from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the first kind of steampunk story I ever read. The description gives me the same delicious shiver, and the same feeling of removal--this is quite clearly a different world from our own.

My one complaint about this book is that we don't learn what the Clockwork Angel of the title is for, or what it does. True, the book cover warns that this is only "Book One" of a series that will be entitled "The Infernal Devices." Clare gets credit for bringing the events of the story to a satisfying conclusion. But why use the title to make a point about the angel itself, only to string readers along? That kind of cliffhanger served to bring my father back to the movie theater every week to see Flash Gordon, but I don't think it's necessary to coerce Clare's legions of readers into seeking the next installment of anything she cares to write.

City of Glass

Cassandra Clare's City of Glass came out last week, and everyone in my household was pleased to hear that it's a wonderful ending to a great YA trilogy. We bought it at a bookstore in the train station in Chicago, and Eleanor read it all the way back to my brother's house in the suburbs, and then every moment she could snatch the next day. There were parts that made her exclaim out loud, and when she handed it to me, she said I should hurry up because she wanted to talk about it with someone. Well, I've been doing my best to hurry up with it all week, because Eleanor left for a band trip in the wee hours of this morning, giving me a deadline in the busiest part of the week, before I could have any free time to read. But City of Glass is a novel you make time to read.

Eleanor and I laughed and I cried out loud while reading this book. At one point I even got angry. I slapped the book shut (with my finger marking my place) and said to her "if I find out Sebastian is Clary's brother, I'm going to be so mad! I mean, listen to this: 'she went numb with an icy shock of wrongness. Something was terribly wrong...' I just can't stand it when somehow a character 'just knows' that it's WRONG to kiss her brother." Eleanor assured me that the feeling of wrongness was not merely about family ties. Eventually, I settled in and learned to trust the storyteller. In the end, I found that the trilogy is about more than just "the importance of being nephilim." In fact, the treatment of the "Downworlders" reminds me of the treatment of house elves, goblins, and other non-wizarding magical creatures in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. I wouldn't say that Clare's fiction is derivative, but rather that her magical world intersects with other fictional magical worlds (most notably Holly Black's, whose characters watch Clare's characters go by, at one point). I especially like the way the Seelie Queen is left flat-footed at the end of this novel; it's immensely satisfying to see someone finally stand up to her. As Captain Jack Sparrow would say, it's all about leverage.

City of Glass brings most of the things I enjoyed in the first two books to satisfying conclusions: the humor, the characterizations of evil, and the love story. In addition, (to Eleanor's quite vocal delight on first reading) it provides a nice little reply to fans of Stephanie Meyers' forever-seventeen vampire Edward in the musings of Clare's vampire Simon:
"Young forever, Simon thought. It sounded good, but did anyone really want to be sixteen forever? It would have been one thing to be frozen forever at twenty-five, but sixteen? To always be this gangly, to never really grow into himself, his face or his body? Not to mention that, looking like this, he'd never be able to go into a bar and order a drink. Ever. For eternity."

There's less humor in this final book, but Magnus Bane still gets a few good lines, including another one about how old he is:
"'I'm seven hundred years old, Alexander. I know when something isn't going to work. You won't even admit I exist to your parents.'
Alec stared at him. 'You're seven hundred years old?'
'Well,' Magnus amended, 'eight hundred. But I don't look it.'"
And even though Magnus promises to play a crucial role in the events of this novel, we're still no more sure we can trust him than Clary is--"she wondered why she'd ever thought trusting someone who wore that much eyeliner was a good idea."
Simon also gets some of the humorous lines in this final novel. Our favorite is:
"Has there ever been an Inquisitor who didn't die a horrible death?" he wondered aloud. "It's like being the drummer in Spinal Tap."

The issues involved in how to fight for good and against evil are nicely nuanced, even in the title City of Glass. The vampire looks "faintly green" at the idea of drinking blood from a cat, because he has a pet cat at home. Clary finally gets to tell her mother that it's not a mother's right to protect her child from who and what she is. And, more importantly, Clary comes up with a clever way to use her magical talents and help her friends, and she succeeds in convincing the entire community of adults that they need her to do it. Valentine meets the end he richly deserves, but not as an entirely black and unlamented villain.

And the love story. It's a good one. Clary won't give in to her own urge to love Jace, early on, because she thinks, as she says to him, he only wants "something else you can hate yourself for." Jace finally tells her "I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there's a life after that, I'll love you then." And Clary is finally able to say yes to Jace, a sort of Molly Bloom eternal yes that goes a long way towards reconciling me to the angel ex machina way Clary and Jace reach their happy ending.

Once Walker has gotten a turn to read this book, I'm pretty sure Eleanor and I will be rereading it. Because now that our anxiety over what happens is assuaged, we'll want to sit back and enjoy these characters some more.

The Importance of Being Nephilim

My daughter recommended some books to me this summer, and it took me until December to get around to them. Once I did, though, they meshed interestingly with some of the other YA books I've been reading (see previous mention here and another pop culture reference here), and lived up to the cover blurb by Holly Black that made Eleanor notice the first one, City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare.

We both liked Holly Black's Tithe, Valiant and Ironside, and like that series, this one has some original ideas and images to add to the fantasy, while it's based on age-old stories. In City of Bones, the Nephilim are called "Shadowhunters." They hunt demons and, under the auspices of their "Clave," have some authority over "Downworlders," like vampires and werewolves. The main character, Clary, begins the story unaware that she is the daughter of a powerful Shadowhunter who has raised her as human, Jocelyn, and that her father is one of the biggest villains in Shadowhunter history, thought to have died fifteen years before. Clary believes that her father, Valentine, is dead, and that the fine-looking Shadowhunter boy she is falling in love with, Jace, is no relation. Almost like Jack Worthing, Clary discovers the overwhelming importance of her family connections, which strikes me as funny.

There's a lot of humor in the books, which are collectively called "The Mortal Instruments" after the objects the characters are racing to find, in order to thwart the villain. When Jace shows Clary a picture of the "mortal cup," he points to the motto on its base, in Latin, and tells her "it means 'Shadowhunters: Looking Better in Black Than the Widows of our Enemies Since 1234.'" It's not just Jace who is funny, either. The dialogue has good moments, like when a group of young Shadowhunters climbs into a van with Clary and her friend Simon:
"Shotgun!" announced Clary as Jace came back around the side of the van.
Alec grabbed for his bow, strapped across his back. "Where?"
"She means she wants the front seat," said Jace, pushing wet hair out of his eyes.
And in the middle of all the teenage agonizing over Clary being unable to reciprocate her best friend Simon's feelings of romantic love, there are spots of humor. Simon tells her
"I'd always hoped that when I finally said 'I love you' to a girl, she'd say 'I know' back, like Leia did to Han in Return of the Jedi."
"That is so geeky," Clary said, unable to help herself.
Even at one of the climactic moments of the book, when Clary learns that Valentine is her father, she says:
"Don't get upset? You're telling me that my dad is a guy who's basically an evil overlord, and you want me not to get upset?"

Despite the humor, though, the evil in City of Bones is very real. Before we know it's Valentine, we can tell there's something very wrong with a father who gives his son a falcon, tells him to train it, and then breaks its neck so that the boy will learn "that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed." We see, as Clary says, that "he was clearly evil. All that stuff he was spouting about keeping the human race pure and the importance of untainted blood--he was like one of those creepy white power guys." Or like a Slytherin, we might think. But Valentine is not a two-dimensional villain with a black mustache. His son also tells the story of how, when he was five, he wanted to take a bath in spaghetti, and his father arranged it. Valentine, for some reason, refrains from killing his son at the end of City of Bones, and again in the second book in the series, City of Ashes.

City of Ashes continues the humor, the love story, and the machinations of evil, and I enjoyed it as much or more than the first book. As I said in an earlier review, Clare is not very interested in how her "Shadowhunters" and "Downworlders" got to be the way they are since they were first named. In a rare moment of introspection, a werewolf named Maia thinks to herself: "Vampires and werewolves were just people with a disease, that much she understood, but expecting her to believe in all that heaven and hell crap, demons and angels, and still nobody could tell her for sure if there was a God or not, or where you went after you died?"

The villain, Valentine, seems less evil in the second book, as though he is trying to seduce the reader along with the other characters. He sounds almost convincing to me when he says "humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. To mundanes these seem logical, for though mundanes cannot see, understand, or acknowledge the demon worlds, still somewhere buried in their ancient memories, they know that there are those that walk this earth that are other." As he goes on, he sounds almost logical to Clary, except that she has the perspective to see that "somehow he'd made it impossible for her to disagree with him without feeling as if she were standing up for demons who bit children in half."

The love stories seem to be sorted out in the second book, although they are not fully resolved. There's a nice moment when the man who has helped Jocelyn raise Clary, Luke, talks to her about not being able to love Simon in the way he'd like her to:
"Clary, I'm telling you he made his own decisions. What you're blaming yourself for is being what you are. And that's no one's fault and nothing you can change. You told him the truth and he made up his own mind what he wanted to do about that. Everyone has choices to make; no one has the right to take those choices away from us. Not even out of love."
"But that's just it," Clary said. "When you love someone, you don't have a choice....Love takes your choices away."
"It's a lot better than the alternative."

And the moments of humor are even better. One of the reasons for this is that the warlock Magnus has a bigger role in the plot, and he's always fun, whether throwing a party, gelling his hair, or healing and rescuing the heroes. When Clary asks his age, he replies "I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly." In addition to Magnus' untraditional flamboyance, other characters are described in passing as perhaps different from their stock images:
Clary turned to Luke. "Have you got a spider anywhere?"
Luke looked exasperated. "Why would I have a spider? Do I look like someone who would collect them?"
"No offense," Jace said, "but you kind of do."
The high point of the humor, for me at least, is when Clary and Luke try to help Simon, who has become a vampire, try to explain what has happened to him to his parents. Luke gives Clary a pamphlet entitled "How to Come Out to Your Parents" which Simon reads out loud to Clary, substituting the word "undead" for the word "gay":
"Mom, I have something to tell you. I'm undead. Now, I know you may have some preconceived notions about the undead. I know you may not be comfortable with the idea of me being undead. But I'm here to tell you that the undead are just like you and me." Simon paused. "Well, okay. Possibly more like me than you....The first thing you need to understand is that I'm the same person I always was. Being undead isn't the most important thing about me. It's just part of who I am. The second thing you should know is that it isn't a choice. I was born this way." Simon squinted at her over the pamphlet. "Sorry, reborn this way."

There are other good jokes, but it would be mean of me to give them away. Get City of Bones and City of Ashes and read them for yourself sometime this winter, before the third book, already written, comes out on March 24. Eleanor and I are waiting anxiously for it.