Wizards and demons and London, oh my

The Amulet of Samarkand , by Jonathan Stroud. Reviewed by N. Vivian on October 23rd, 2008.

This is a great book. I picked it up, started laughing, and didn't really stop until I was done. The basic premise of the story is that in magical London, there are two basic social strata: magicians and everyone else. Magicians are The Guys In Charge; they run the government, have all the money, and can bully regular folks at will. They get their power by summoning various ranks of demons (afrits, djinnis, marids, etc), binding them, and them sending them out to do stuff. In his years, Bartimaeus (the djinni that gives his name to the trilogy) has built the walls of Prague, Karnak, and Jericho, the Parthenon, the Stone Bridge, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa (which would have stayed straight if the architects had only listened to him). These demons can do lots of other things, too. They're your basic magical slaves; the greater demon you can summon and bind, the better the stuff you can make him do.

Though the book is about a young Magician's apprentice named Nathaniel, Bartimaeus is the narrator. Thank God, because Nathaniel is completely unlikeable (deliberately so), and Bartimaeus is funny, arrogant, witty, and a delightful braggart. His sections of the book generally have amusing footnotes, where he further explains how awesome he is or makes snide remarks about magicians:

"1 Doubtless, [behind Shields] was where the British magicians were skulking, at a safe distance from the action. My Czech masters were just the same. In war, magicians always like to reserve the most dangerous jobs for themselves, such as fearlessly guarding large quantities of food and drink a few miles behind the lines." (This is actually from the second book, because the first is downstairs and I don't feel like going to get it).

For all that their magic comes from demons, magicians are giant assholes to them. Basically, Bartimaeus and his ilk are their slaves, and the magicians treat them as such: nasty punishments, peremptory demands, general disdain for the demons' thoughts, feelings, or anything else. This is much the same way that they treat the common folk, except they generally don't bother talking to the commoners. After all, other than provide the wizards with food, clothing, service, and all that stuff, the commoners can't actually do anything important for them. Important is defined as magical, by the way.

Magicians are not allowed to have children (leads to dynasties and nasty things like that), so children who are born with magic are taken from their families and given to another magician to raise. Nathaniel is given to Mr. Underwood, an assistant minister of Internal Affairs.. Nathaniel ends up resenting his master for a variety of reasons, and takes to learning advanced magic by himself, up in his room where no one knows what he's doing. Underwood, a mediocre magician himself, is under the impression that Nathaniel's barely passable, which Nathaniel uses to his advantage. Anywho, the book opens with Nathaniel summoning Bartimaeus and sending him to fetch the Amulet of Samarkand from another magician, Simon Lovelace, who humiliated Nathaniel the year before. Simon had received the amulet under highly suspicious circumstances, and Nathaniel wants it so he can claim vengeance on Simon.

Nathaniel, as I said above, is an unpleasant character. He has absorbed a lot of the traits that the magicians have, including contempt for commoners, contempt for his demons, a tendency to favor the "If I double cross you first, you can't double cross me at all" approach to dealing with Bartimaeus, and all the arrogance that a privileged, genius child develops when he knows he can run rings around his keepers. Balancing that out, he does have a loyal streak, he's brave (and by brave, I pretty much mean foolhardy), and he is really smart. I'm hoping that he's such a jerk in the first book so we can see some real character growth from him down the line. He learns in this book that not all magicians are good guys (the climax of the novel comes when he and Bartimaeus have to stop Lovelace from unleashing some nasty demon-thing that'll eat all the other magicians in Britain), and I'm hoping in the next one, he'll learn that people without magic are really people, too.

So, yes, it was a book I enjoyed immensely. I immediately went out and picked up the second book, which I've barely begun. Bartimaeus is snarky and has a dim view of humanity (and rightly so) that he shares with the reader at every given opportunity. Nathaniel is unlikable and does stupid things, but I can forgive him this because it is clearly setting him up for character growth later. And since he's not the actually narrator for most of the book, I don't get frustrated with his stupidity the way I normally would--it just gave me an extra reason to like Bartimaeus, who also thinks the kid is an asshat.

I'm also really looking forward to the movie release. Religious groups are going to explode. This is a boy who summons demons to get magic. And they thought Harry Potter's mangled Latin was bad...

4.5 stars

In books I trust,
N. Vivian