Active Voice

By Jonathan Stroud [LibraryThing - Amazon]

When Nathaniel, a young magician-in-training, summons the djinni Bartimaeus to get revenge for a minor humiliation, he has no idea that he’s embroiling the two of them in a massive conspiracy. As the years pass and Nathaniel rises in influence in the government, various coups fall, each one merely an offshoot of the one that threatens not just England, but the world. In the end, it’s up to Nathaniel, Bartimaeus, and Resistance fighter Kitty Jones to save the day – if they can stop squabbling long enough to do it.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy does two very daring things. The first has to do with the narrative structure. The first book of the trilogy, The Amulet of Samarkand, is divided pretty evenly between Nathaniel’s point of view and Bartimaeus’s; the second two books are divided between Nathaniel, Bartimaeus, and Kitty. But while Nathaniel and Kitty have pretty standard third-person narration, Bartimaeus’s sections are told in a very informal first-person, complete with footnotes for all of his historical tangents and sarcastic asides. Had Stroud come to me before writing this series and told me of his plan to write the books that way, I would have advised him strongly against it, said there was no way anyone could pull it off. And yet – he does. Somehow it works, and works well.

The other daring thing Stroud does has to do with Nathaniel. Both Rebecca and I have talked about the Everykid problem on this blog. The Everykid (obviously a younger version of the Everyman) is a sort of bland, inoffensive figure who often takes center stage in fiction. By making the protagonist an Everykid, the author seeks to give the reader a featureless character to project him- or herself onto, and when handled poorly the Everykid becomes a void through which the story progresses, rather than a character in his or her own right.

Stroud sidestepped this problem neatly by making his primary protagonist, Nathaniel, a giant pain in the butt. No Everykid, this – Nathaniel is arrogant, cruel, emotionally constipated, and bigoted. He often makes the wrong choice or says the wrong thing, and in fact the first five sixths of the series show his spiral down from “kind of obnoxious kid” to “actually rather horrible young man.” (Naturally, that last sixth brings him back up again, and it’s a very enjoyable journey.) Again, I would hesitate to advise a writer to make their protagonist obnoxious, but it works! And despite it all, there’s something kind of lovable about Nathaniel.

This may be because Nathaniel’s bad qualities are easy to understand, based on his upbringing. The Bartimaeus Trilogy takes place in an modern day but pseudo-Victorian London, where magicians rule the British Empire (and therefore the world), while commoners (non-magicians) are treated like less than garbage. All magic comes from summoning demons of various degrees, though the commoners are mostly ignorant of this fact. Thus it’s a world built half on severe classism and half on slavery, and the series is very serious about exploring alternatives to both of these problems, highlighted by Kitty and Bartimaeus respectively.

Neither of these characters have Nathaniel’s hard-to-like quality. Bartimaeus is witty, charming, and a fantastic, if unreliable, narrator. But he’s not two-dimensional, despite his non-human, 5,000-year-old status – he grows and changes throughout the books, and is a much deeper character than he original seems. Kitty, meanwhile, is sheer brilliance. The series improves markedly once she becomes a major character in the second and third books. Clever, defiant, and tough as nails, with a journey that reflects Nathaniel’s – from idealism to despair and back to a more mature hope – she’s incredibly fun to read about and I want to be her when I grow up. Furthermore, the relationships that develop between the three characters are fascinating and complex, since they all totally hate each other but also kind of secretly love each other just a little bit. It makes me wish for more books in the series.

What more can I say? The villains are properly villainous, the plots are tight and exciting, the world is fully realized, the moral ambiguities are thought-provoking. I adored the characters and was sad to say goodbye to them at the end. I could go on, but it would get both boring and spoilery, so I’ll just say that The Bartimaeus Trilogy gets the coveted five cupcakes, and a cherry on top.