[Originally posted on tumblr on 28. July 2013]
I finished ‘A Madness of Angels’ by Kate Griffith this week. Finally! Unfortunately I have been negleting my reading as of late so it took me a bit longer than this book actually deserved.
If you saw my last post about this book you know I was a bit confused at first about everything that happens in there. That’s because the author doesn’t infodump stuff when it first happens. That is actually good in my opinion.
Also, please don’t be rude to me, I liked Kate Griffith’s London MUCH better than Gaiman’s London in Neverwhere. These two novels are both in the urban fantasy genre and somewhat comparable.
The thing about this book is that at first I had no idea what was happening because the protagonist refered to himself as ‘we’ and ‘us’. That’s because the so called ‘blue electric angels’ inhabit his body along with him. You get all the neat explanations about the different kinds of magic users but I think the kind the protagonist is is the most important: He’s an urban sorcerer. He’s the sort of magic user that draws the power from all around him in the city and uses it in a quite raw fashion. That’s actually really cool because the magic in Griffith’s London works in a fascinating fashion: Life is magic. That means in this book that life also creates magic. The life left behind on the telephone lines created the blue electric angels. It’s sort of like as if a belief comes to live if a lot of people think hard enough about it. Crowd influenced magic.
That’s not all there is to the book. The ‘bad guy’ also comes across not as bad as he might be at first. He seems confused and that made him really interesting to me. The protagonist’s allies don’t even like him all that much which is also a bit funny.
And then there are the blue electric angels.
Oh wow. They’re a great bunch.
At one point they decided to take a break and go to the movies:
I admit I laughed far too long about this. They also visited the theatre but to my great shame I have no knowledge of theatre plays and I didn’t even mark the page, my bad.
Anyway, I like Matthew Swift and his world so much that I want to read the second book as well. Especially since it seems to be about someone who wants his hat back and leaves hard to oversee messages about it. Hilarious!
