grey sister [book review]

Unsurprisingly, as soon I got my hands on the second [hardcover] volume after Red Sister, Grey Sister, I could not resist reading it. Nursing a serious cold, gotten while visiting Warwick wearing only summer gear (!), helped and I thus spent my Sunday reading feverishly through Mark Lawrence’s latest book. As I enjoyed very much the first volume, immersing into the same “boarding school” atmosphere was easy, reuniting with most characters, including some I though had been dead and missing others I had not realised they had been killed (no spoiler, just my imperfect memory!).

“The greatest threat to any faith is not other faiths or beliefs but the corruption and division of its own message”

With this bias inherited from the earlier volume, read four weeks ago, I cannot say I did not enjoy the book. Actually, the first half of Grey Sister is more enjoyable than the first volume because the training of the young novices in the Sweet Mercy monastery gets more focused, with more complex challenges, and less boarding school bickering nonsense. Except for one main thread that weights too much on the plot in my opinion (no spoiler, again, as it is almost obvious from the start that the rivalry between Nona, the main character, and a high born novice is there for a purpose). There is an Ender’s Game moment that I particularly enjoyed, with an Alexander’s resolution of a Gordian knot, which comes to signal the end of the almost peaceful part. I liked very much less the second half, taking place on the run away from the Sweet Mercy monastery, where there are too many coincidences and too many intersections of paths that one wishes the author had gone for this Alexander’s resolution of a Gordian knot himself! I think the plot almost peters out at this stage and only survives by sheer inertia, too many boulders loose at once to all stop at the same time!

“The sky above was a deep maroon, shading towards black, strewn with dark ribbons of cloud that looked like lacerations where jagged peaks tore the heavens.”

The style is sometimes repetitive and sometimes on the heavy side, as the quote above I wish someone has re-read. Despite  the grand (and somewhat nefarious) schemes of Abbess Glass, the story is too homely, which may be why the part “at home” feels more convincing that the part outside. The main villain’s plans for taking power over the whole country and the artificial moon are incredible, unconvincing and definitely sketchy, even when explained in the middle of a royal brawl. However, the continued description of the ice-encased universe, saved from complete freeze by an artificial moon and four nuclear reactors, plus an increasing role of magic, make the background compelling and leave me eager for the final (?) volume in the series.

broken homes [book review]

Even though this is the fourth volume in the Peter Grant series, I did read it first [due to my leaving volume one in my office in Coventry and coming across this one in an airport bookstore in Düsseldorf], an experiment I do not advise anyone to repeat as it kills some of the magic in Rivers of London [renamed Midnight Riots on the US market, for an incomprehensible reason!, with the series being recalled Rivers of London, but at least they left the genuine and perfect covers…, not like some of the other foreign editions!] and makes reading Broken homes an exercise in guessing. [Note for ‘Og’s readers suffering from Peter Grant fatigue: the next instalment, taking the seemingly compulsory trip Outside!—witness the Bartholomew series—, is waiting for me in Warwick, so I will not read it before the end of January!]

“I nodded sagely. `You’re right,’ I said. `We need a control.’
`Seriously?’she asked.
`Otherwise, how do you know the variable you’ve changed is the one having the effect?’ I said.”

Now, despite this inauspicious entry, I did enjoy Broken homes as much [almost!] as the other volumes in the series. It mostly takes place in a less familiar [for a French tourist like me] part of London, but remains nonetheless true to its spirit of depicting London as a living organism! There are mostly characters from the earlier novels, but the core of the story is an infamous housing estate built by a mad architect in Elephant and Castle, not that far from Waterloo [Station], but sounding almost like a suburb from Aaronovitch’s depiction! Actually, the author has added a google map for the novel locations on his blog, wish I had it at the time [kind of difficult to get in a plane!].

“Search as I might, nobody else was offering free [wifi] connections to the good people of Elephant and Castle.”

The plot itself is centred on this estate [not really a spoiler, is it?] and the end is outstanding in that it is nothing like one would expect. With or without reading the other volumes. I still had trouble understanding the grand scheme of the main villain, while I have now entirely forgotten about the reasons for the crime scene at the very beginning of Broken homes. Rereading the pages where the driver, Robert Weil, appears did not help. What was his part in the story?! Despite this [maybe entirely personal] gap, the story holds well together, somewhat cemented by the characters populating the estate, who are endowed with enough depth to make them truly part of the story, even when they last only a few pages [spoiler!]. And as usual style and grammar and humour are at their best!