"Foxglove Summer", Ben Aaronovitch

[igenlode]

This is very much a 'Londoner goes to the country' story, where the idea is that our protagonist is a fish out of water when he finds himself outside his own 'manor', and when I first read it I was left a bit disappointed for the first time in this series. There are a lot of elements that I like -- we learn more snippets about the history of the Folly, its practitioners, and Nightingale in particular (and some clues to Molly), and the sense of betrayal from Lesley's abrupt exit in the previous volume isn't swept under the carpet but becomes a constant thread throughout the book. I loved the Faerie Queen riding to the rescue (in fact I'd remembered that as a much more significant scene than it turned out to be on re-reading, and I was a bit let down to discover that it was only a brief scene-closer), and the general police-procedural and magico-mechanical elements of the plot are as enthralling as ever... until the kidnapping has been solved.

But it did feel as if there were an awful lot of loose ends after that. In fact, I actually assumed that the issue of the 'extra' changeling must surely be dealt with in the sequel, because we've just left with an unwanted fairy child who is, in fact, pure human, plus a child who has grown up thinking herself human but never really was, and no explanation as to what happens to either of them -- it would have been a lot neater if the return exchange had simply been allowed to go ahead, and it's not at all clear what, if anything, Peter Grant gains by frustrating it. And there is never any explanation as to how Nicole's father managed to sire a fairy child in the first place (Peter even brings the question up as puzzling, which is poor tactics for an author to use if he hasn't got an answer) or why the swap was ever made and why the changeling was claimed back at that point. The whole episode seems to arbitrarily take place in order to contrive to bring Peter into the country for a change of scene, but there don't even seem to be any consequences in terms of things Kicking Off back in London with his absence having been a supernatural conspiracy in order to facilitate that.

Did the unicorn really eat Stan's stash of drugs and agricultural diesel, and if so, why? And why was it stabbing sheep? We're told that there has been a renewed spate of psychic phenomena in the area and that this happens periodically in cycles, but we ultimately get no explanation. The kidnapping is a crime that doesn't make sense on its own terms, while nothing is really dealt with (unicorns and elves are still running round causing mayhem for unspecified reasons) -- it's a terribly open-ended case. And so far as I could tell, the immediate sequel goes off in a completely different direction, so the cliff-hangers aren't deliberate... unless they come into play an awfully long way down the line. Unlike Lesley's activities, which are unexplained but obviously form the start of something that will become important in the future.

I also found bringing back Beverley Brook (an equally urban character) as local ecology and geography consultant to be too much to swallow; handwaving her few months of exile among 'the Thames boys' in the upper reaches of the river as somehow making her now an expert on the countryside didn't seem very likely. It would have been a lot more plausible to use one of the local rivers -- one of the briefly-glimpsed Teifeiddiadd family, for instance, who barely perform any role in the story -- as the source if that stuff was actually necessary, although again all the regurgitated geology didn't seem terribly relevant to the outcome of the case. I think the idea was to emphasise the uncanniness of the wood by saying that it was the wrong habitat for the foxgloves, but that part didn't seem to play much role in the long run. Beverley just seemed to be spouting a textbook, and it felt out of character.

(I suspect the main authorial reason for her presence in the book was to get Peter into bed with her, which was a development I didn't actually object to, being too grateful that at least it wasn't Lesley...)

The minor thing that noticeably grated was the way that Peter kept describing everybody throughout the book as 'a white woman', 'a big white man', 'the waitress was white', etc. The first time or two it serves as a very effective jolt to remind the reader (and in between books I had forgotten, because it's something the protagonist himself naturally takes for granted and therefore doesn't normally go on about) that Peter himself is not 'white' and doesn't take it for granted that this is the default state of affairs. But after a chapter or so we get the message... we're on the Welsh borders and people here are white. All of them. It evidently is the default state of affairs in this area, and it just doesn't feel natural that the narrator would keep going on about it; it's as if I went to Ghana (say) and wrote a travel journal specifically mentioning the skin colour of everyone I met with the same degree of surprise every time. After a bit I think I (and the reader) would start to take it for granted that the waitress was black, and the woman who lived in the house by the church was black, and the street vendors were black, and the politicians were black, and the ticket inspector on the train was black... and maybe if someone wasn't black, then that would be worthy of note!
(It occurs to me belatedly that maybe that is why practioners have apparently begun to nickname Peter "the Nightingale's Starling" -- a curious, investigative black bird?)

I can see that the aim of the 'white' business is to establish that Peter stands out by virtue of looking different (see also: Beverley's dreadlocks and "I'm From Round Here, Stupid" T-shirt), but the device starts to feel a bit laboured -- and it starts to feel like a device, which is not good.

So... a creditable follow-up for the 'Rivers of London' series, but it was the first one that left me feeling a bit let-down at the end :-(