Book Review Saturday – ‘The Magic Thief’

I actually read ‘The Magic Thief’ a little while ago, but I’m currently enjoying its sequel so the story-world is on my mind and fresh in my memory. Here, have a look. Isn’t it pretty?

Image: bellaonbooks.wordpress.com

One of the many things I loved about this book (because I’m a tactile creature) is the way it feels. It’s a wonderful shape, slightly more square than an ‘average’ paperback – not that you can tell from the image above – and wonderfully thick. It’s also stuffed full of illustrations, coded messages, letters and diary entries, which sit alongside the text and are as much as part of the story as the words themselves. It’s a beautiful object.

The story introduces us to Connwaer (referred to as Conn), a pick-pocket who lives by his wits in the streets of the city of Wellmet. The city is divided in half – one side is referred to as the Twilight, where Conn lives, and is slightly more down-at-heel than the other side, the Sunrise – and a wide river runs through it, upon which are several small islets. A map is helpfully included at the beginning, which I always love. As far as I understood, the city being referred to as ‘the Twilight’ and ‘the Sunrise’ didn’t have anything to do with their relative levels of darkness and light – they were just names. I did find that a bit confusing, as in I expected the Twilight to be constantly dark and the Sunrise to be constantly bright, but that’s probably just me being silly and over-literal.

In any case, one evening Conn decides to pick the pocket of a deceptively frail-looking old man, and gets far more than he’d bargained for. This old man is Nevery Flinglas, a hugely powerful wizard who has returned (unofficially) from exile in order to figure out why Wellmet’s reserves of magic have been dwindling, and how to fix it. Wellmet runs on magic, and everything – from its power to its economy – relies upon it. So, when Conn picks Nevery’s pocket, he ends up stealing his locus magicalicus, or the stone he uses to focus his magic (also called a ‘locus stone’.) It is akin to a wizard’s soul, perhaps – the core of his power, the most sacred part of his being, and his most treasured possession. More importantly, touching Nevery’s locus magicalicus should have killed Conn.

But it doesn’t.

Intrigued, Nevery takes the boy in, and decides to train him as an apprentice in an attempt to get to the bottom of his mysterious survival. They return to Nevery’s house, Heartsease, which remains in a state of disrepair since his forced departure twenty years before; it has a huge hole blown right through its centre after a botched magical experiment, and has never been repaired. Conn – for the first time in his life warm, and fed, and a focus of interest – decides to stay with Nevery and his manservant Benet, and gradually it becomes clear that he is far more than a ‘mere’ thief. Despite being illiterate and unschooled, he manages to understand, on a very deep level, the spells that Nevery teaches him, and he only needs to hear the words of a spell once before they are imprinted upon his memory. Clearly, Conn is more than he appears to be.

Nevery enrolls him in the Academicos, a school for wizards (and no – it’s nothing like Harry Potter. I was surprised to see so many reviews on Goodreads slam this book for being a ‘Harry Potter ripoff’, simply because it features magic and magical students. Not every book which features magic is a ripoff of Potter. Magic, magical schools and students of magic existed in literature before Potter, and – with any luck – will continue to exist in our post-Potter world. The Academicos is its own thing, and it is not a second-rate version of Hogwarts. Rant over.) Conn isn’t accepted there, to say the least, not only because of his origins but because he doesn’t have his own locus magicalicus. You’re not a real wizard without your own locus stone, it seems, and so he sets off on a quest to find it.

This, of course, won’t be easy.

And, as well as that, there’s the question of Wellmet’s disappearing magic to worry about. Where is it going? What’s happening to it? And – vitally – what will happen to Wellmet when all the magic vanishes?

An illustration typical of the book, showing Nevery’s diary, Conn, Nevery and Benet on a backdrop of the map of Wellmet
Image: sarah-prineas.com
Artist: Antonio Javier Caparo

Conn is sure that the received wisdom regarding magic is wrong, and he develops his own ideas about how magic works, and a possible explanation as to what’s happening to it. Of course, because he’s not a hairy-bearded wizard with seventy years’ experience, nobody listens to what he has to say. Despite his obvious talent, Nevery keeps telling him to knuckle down with his apprenticeship and leave the thinking to him, and with his fellow students (and their masters) trying to nobble him at every turn, Conn does the only thing he can: try to solve the mystery on his own.

I really enjoyed this book. I loved Conn, and I enjoyed his relationship with Nevery. I really liked the character of Benet, who – as well as being handy with his fists in a crisis, is also an accomplished knitter and baker – and I liked Rowan, Conn’s only friend in the Academicos. I admired Prineas’ world-building in this book and how things are lightly, but sufficiently, sketched. I thought the writing was good, if very slightly guilty of ‘telling, not showing’ at times, and I was intrigued by Wellmet, its governance and structure, and the nature of magic itself.

In short, highly recommended!

A locus magicalicus… don’t touch it!
(Artist: Antonio Javier Caparo)
Image: fr.levoleurdemagie.wikia.com

A Matter of Opinion

Monday is creaking itself into position once again, and another chain of days is about to start careering down the slippery slope we call a ‘week’. I hope you had a restful weekend and you’re primed and ready for it.

Good woman, Barbara.
Image: funkmysoul.gr

This past weekend was full of bad news. I’m trying not to even think about some of the news stories that made me sad, or angry, over the last few days – and there were many. I’m not ignoring the fact that things happened in the world which made my red mist descend, and which upset me greatly, but this blog post is all about the positive. Right? Right.

So, let’s not talk about the sad stuff. Not today.

In the spirit of focusing on the non-enraging, one of the more interesting stories over the weekend centred on the kerfuffle surrounding ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling‘, a book which was published to no great acclaim in April. Purporting to be the debut novel of a former soldier and military policeman named Robert Galbraith, the book was receiving good reviews, but had not sold in any huge numbers – reports vary between 500 and 1,500 copies sold – but those who had read it, by all accounts, liked it. Robert Galbraith, the mysterious author, had admitted to writing under a pseudonym to, I suppose, protect his former colleagues and avoid any sort of security issues surrounding his foray into crime writing, but that was far from being the biggest secret Mr. Galbraith was sitting on.

Over the weekend, ‘Mr Galbraith’ was unmasked. Not an ex-military police officer, nor even a man, ‘Galbraith’ is, in fact, J.K. Rowling.

The most interesting thing about the whole situation, I think, is the fact that the manuscript of ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ was, apparently, submitted to at least one publisher (under its pseudonym, of course), and was turned down as being ‘not marketable’; it didn’t stand out from the crowd enough, apparently. It wasn’t head and shoulders above any of the other promising submissions received, and so it wasn’t picked up. I have great respect for the editor of the publishing company who turned the book down purely on its merits, and who is now brave enough to admit it, and to give her reasons for her decision; she could have tried to wash her hands of responsibility, or pretend the decision to turn the book down was a tortuous one. She could have fawned all over J.K. Rowling. She could (horror of horrors!) have apologised for her decision. Instead, she simply explained how she felt the book was solid, decent, well written – but nothing amazing.

I thought this was remarkable. Not only because the editor in question is a brave and principled person, but because it made me feel a whole lot better about the rejections I get which are worded along much the same lines: ‘Thank you for your submission; your work is perfectly fine, but just not marketable in the current publishing climate’, or ‘Your work is not suitable for us – but our opinion is not exhaustive, so don’t give up.’ Whatever your opinion of ‘Harry Potter’ is – whether you believe the books are good, or not – it’s beyond question that J.K. Rowling is the publishing sensation of our time. Anything with her name on it is a foregone conclusion, in terms of publication. It turned out that ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ was eventually published by an imprint of the publisher who handled her book ‘The Casual Vacancy’ last year, but it seems that she submitted it to other publishers, just like any debut author – but found, apparently, little success. The book has received very positive feedback from readers, so it’s not necessarily that her work was not good; it just wasn’t good enough for a publisher to take a punt on it, particularly in the crowded crime/detective fiction market.

Image: en.wikipedia.org

This news story has given me a lot to think about, and no mistake. The first conclusion one could draw would be this: what’s the point of anyone trying to get a book published, as an unknown debut author, if a writer with the ability of J.K. Rowling can’t get picked up? Well – yes and no. That’s an insidious and dangerous way to think; it erodes hope and chips away at the future, and should be avoided. There are always exceptions; there are always chances worth jumping at. You’ve got to have faith in your own work, and keep on going with the submissions even if there seems to be no light on the horizon. Rowling herself was turned down by twelve publishers before she placed ‘Harry Potter’ with Bloomsbury. It can happen. People get published every day. They can’t all be world-defining geniuses. Sometimes, a submission will be good enough – not the best submission in the history of writing, but good enough for a particular agent or publisher, and that’s all you need.

So, instead of being disheartened by the saga of ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ (in hindsight, rather an apt title), I’m choosing to be encouraged by it. A submission is never going to hit the mark with everyone who reads it; not every publisher is going to like, or even tolerate, some of the work you produce – and that’s not a personal thing, despite how hard it can be to separate yourself from your creative work. It doesn’t mean that if you get knocked back by two, or five, or ten agents or publishers, that you should give up the search – there will, hopefully, be an appreciative ear out there for what you’re writing, and what a shame it would be to give up before you find it.

Of course, if every person to whom you submit your work says something along the lines of: ‘In our opinion, a novel about interstellar time-travelling leprechauns written in rhyming couplets which can, due to the fact you’ve written it in disappearing ink, only be read on the first Tuesday of every month in full moonlight is not exactly the most market-friendly thing; perhaps you should consider submitting something else, or reworking this entirely,’ then maybe it’s time to start thinking: it’s not them. It’s me.

Until then, keep the faith.