Book Review: Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

Reviewed by J. D. Popham

Until now the Rivers of London series has kept Police Constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant close to home and followed his encounters with the ghosts, mystical creatures and Newtonian magics that exist just beyond the public's sight in contemporary London.  In London, of course, even things that go bump in the night are subject to the Queen’s peace, and the Metropolitan Police has the job of dealing with breaches of said peace; even when they involve malevolent spirits, jazz vampires and river goddesses.  

Foxglove Summer, the fifth book in the series, takes PC Grant out of his beloved London and deep into the English countryside; to Herefordshire, to be precise.  There, two eleven year-old girls have gone missing and the search for them has captured the attention of the 24-hour news machine and thus the British public. What with the disturbing connection between the blood of innocents and the more ethically challenged magics, Grant is dispatched by Inspector Nightingale to check in on an elderly wizard, long retired to the area, in order to confirm that he is not somehow involved in the girl's disappearance. 

Before long both Peter Grant and the urban river goddess Beverly Brook, are drawn into the search proper. What follows is a very pleasant collision between urban Fantasy and the rustic/rural wellspring of the tales and folklore that form much of modern fantasy's foundation.  At the same time Foxglove Summer's police procedural elements get the opportunity to rub shoulders with British police/detective fiction's countryside tradition. 
  
The urban/rural divide in English crime fiction is one of long standing.  Sherlock Holmes famously opined in Silver Blaze that "the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside".  Happily, Aaronovitch avoids reaching for the threadbare tropes about the city cop out of his element in the sticks.  PC Grant is as good humored as he is tough and clever, and his view of the countryside and its denizens is pragmatic and even-handed.  Besides, between his duties as a copper in the ongoing search for the missing girls, magical doings afoot, and a river goddess to act as his liaison with the local genius loci, boredom is the least of Peter Grant's worries.  

London has been central to the Rivers series so far, and setting Foxglove Summer in the English countryside makes evident the degree to which the city drives the tempo and energy of Aaronovitch's Peter Grant stories. The little town of Rushpool lacks the kinetic charge of London, and not even the frantic search for the girls and the accompanying news media feeding frenzy is going to change that.

This, however, is where Aaronovitch shows his skill as a story-teller. He never fights his setting or attempts to press Rushpool or its denizens into behaving out of character as a means of injecting energy into Foxglove Summer.  Rather, he lets the story move at a pace appropriate to the setting, allowing Peter Grant's narrative voice, his observations of and interactions with the town, and with the emerging evidence of the fantastic that lies beneath, provide the book's rhythm and tempo.

Some of Aaronovitch's more impatient readers have grumbled that the Rivers story arc featuring the Faceless Man, the series' primary antagonist, gets little attention in this outing. Over at Tor.com Liz Bourke has gone so far as to dismiss Foxglove Summer as a 'placeholder novel', which it is certainly not.  Given that in Broken Homes Peter's fellow constable and apprentice Leslie May betrayed Peter, Nightingale and the Metropolitan Police, joining the Faceless Man on the ethically challenged side of both magic and the law, they can be forgiven for feeling a bit let down.  However, anyone paying attention to the pacing of the Rivers series to date will have expected the sound and fury of the Faceless subplot to recede to the background in Foxglove Summer.

Aaronovitch tends to avoid spending his story's dramatic tension all at once. He leaves the Faceless Man subplot largely behind periodically, knowing the reader will be all the hungrier for it when he returns.  However, to call Foxglove Summer a mere placeholder is to imply that its central story is throw-away and that the book contributes nothing of value to the larger story arc, neither of which is the case.  Foxglove merely changes the larger story's tempo, creating a bit of narrative elbow room before foreshadowing the storm to come.    

By doing so, Aaronovitch allows himself the space and literary tempo needed to extend Peter Grant's character at something less than a gallop.  It also allows the author to develop Beverly Brook, who has been consigned to cameo appearances since her introduction in Rivers of London, and to give their heretofore slow-approach relationship room to breathe and unfold naturally.  He uses Foxglove to expand the back-story of Molly, Nightingale's otherworldly housekeeper, of Ettenberg where the flower of English wizardry was broken, and to hint at what is walled away in the basement of the Folly behind sheets of battleship steel.  And we learn that that the Genius Loci of the rivers of London are reaching out and establishing their own entente with their peers in the countryside.

Foxglove Summer is worth your hard-earned shekels, and I recommend it.  Fans of the Aaronovitch's earlier works will enjoy it (provided they can school themselves to patience) and readers who wish make Peter Grant's acquaintance without reading the series from its beginning will find Foxglove a good place to jump in.

Alas for our American readers, while released in the UK in November, Foxglove Summer will not be sold by US retailers until January. The Infinite Reach will reference this review again when the book is released in the US, lest you forget.

Book Review: Broken Homes

Review by J. D. Popham

Broken Homes, the fourth in the Rivers of London (AKA Peter Grant) series by Ben Aaronovitch, has all the hallmarks of a ‘reset’ novel.  

If you haven’t noticed, the modern genre fiction market is obsessed with series.  It’s no longer enough to write a good Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. Part of the pitch to an agent or publisher has to be the novel’s potential as a series. 

A one-off success is nice, to be sure, but after its initial blush of financial success it will rapidly fade from a revenue standpoint. A series, on the other hand, is the gift that keeps on giving.  The audience that loved the first book will likely return to buy the second. And then the third, and so on. Readers who discover the series mid-run are likely to go back and buy the earlier installments, boosting sales of the author's back-list. So, the next installment of a successful series is much lower risk proposition for the publisher than a completely new story, and is a cheerfully reliable income stream for the author.  

Consequently, it’s not unusual to see a stand-alone first novel subtitled: ‘Book one in the [insert franchise name here] series’, and left with major plot threads dangling for the folow-on book in the series to take up. 

 

Happily, in Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in the US, as Rivers of London was apparently thought too gentle a title for adrenalin-addled American sensibilities), Ben Aaronovitch delivered a novel that stands easily on its own, managing to avoid the look and feel of a series set-up.  Rivers introduced us to newly minted Police Constable Peter Grant, and follows his first encounters with the ghosts, mystical creatures and Newtonian magics that exist just beyond the public's sight in contemporary London.  In London, of course, even things that go bump in the night are subject to the Queen’s peace, and the Metropolitan Police has the job of dealing with breaches of said peace; even when they involve malevolent spirits and river goddesses.  What follows is an excellent bash-up of Urban Fantasy and police procedural, populated by an engaging cast of well-drawn characters. 

Aaronovitch followed  Rivers of London with Moon over Soho, and  Whispers Under Gound, each of which was as witty as the first, deftly fleshing out and extending Aaronovitch's characters and the London they inhabit, while introducing the reader to London’s jazz vampires, ‘ethically challenged’ wizards, subterranean ‘quiet folk’, goblin markets, demon traps, and a pale lady with a …discomforting MO for murder. 

Broken Homes features the return of the Faceless Man, an evil (or ethically challenged, as Peter Grant would say) wizard introduced in Moon Over Soho. The Faceless Man is, at least for the moment, the series' primary antagonist, though his appearance in Soho is brief and he exists primarily as an undercurrent in Whispers. In Broken Homes he's back and hatching ethically challenged plans that, as the plot thickens, seem to center around Highgarden Estate.  Highgarden, an eccentric high-rise designed by an even more eccentric German architect, and possibly incorporating the principles of industrial scale magic, may be housing more than a colorful collection of aging protesters and low-income cranks.

Broken Homes lacks the easy charm of the first three books in the Rivers of London series.  It has a somewhat distracted quality, the story never quite able to get its footing and momentum until it builds toward its climax.  Each of the previous books has revolved around the revealing of a new facet of London's mystical underground; The genius loci of Rivers, the jazz vampires of Soho, and the quiet folk of Whispers.  In Broken Homes Aaronovitch stands pat with the status quo, allowing the search for the Faceless Man to be the focus of the story and otherwise occupying himself with re-arranging the exiting furniture and adding a few new pieces. 

Aaronovitch introduces us to a number of new characters who seem peripheral for Broken Homes, but I assume will play a larger role going forward. Peter Grant and his Sierra Leonean mother abruptly begin speaking Krio with each other, with no hint given as to why they've never done so in any of the previous books. A nurse from Whispers is promoted in Homes from a bland secondary character to a lead role as the dynamic and exceedingly dangerous Varvara Sidorovna, a Russian witch and magical assassin. The book's most significant change would amount to a spoiler and so cannot be mentioned here. Suffice it to say that we leave Broken Homes with the field of play very much changed and 'To Be Continued' writ large in the skies over Perter Grant's London.

I suspect this is due, at least in part, to the fourth book having to pull double duty.  Homes must attend to its own story while laying groundwork for future books and resetting certain aspects of the Rivers of London series back-story.  I would venture this is occurring for the happy reason that Aaronovitch didn't anticipate how successful the Peter Grant series would be.  With Rivers apparently settling in for a long run, Aaronovitch likely needed to make changes in order to avoid being boxed in by the series' first three books.  In such cases sooner is better than later and, with this housekeeping complete, I look forward to a return to form in Aaronovitch's next book.

This is not to say that Broken Homes isn't worth the readers time and money.  While it doesn't cohere as well as its predecessors it is an entertaining read. However, it is not a good introduction to Peter Grant and the denizens of his London.  It does not stand on its own as did its predecessors, and those unfamiliar with the series will want to introduce themselves through its earlier books. Which, as homework assignments go, is a very pleasant one. PC Grant and company are acquaintances well worth making.