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chomijiI was reading these between manga series, and I have to say I was underwhelmed. This isn't the Garth Nix of Sabriel, Lyriel, and Abhorsen ... we're back to the Garth Nix of >sigh< The Ragwitch.
Asthmatic Arthur Penhaligon is a young teenager in what seems to be a near-future Britain, which is a more totalitiarian place than it is today. He's destined to die because of complications from his illness, but instead becomes involved with a mysterious artifact that turns out to be a Key. He has, in fact, become part of a Collect-the-Coupons quest, to use the terminology of Nick Lowe's essay in Ansible.
Mister Monday & Grim Tuesday (reviews)
There's nothing inherently wrong with this type of plot, examples of which include Lord of the Rings and The Dark Is Rising (and I do think that Mr. Lowe is unnecessarily cruel to Susan Cooper's series in his Ansible essay). But Nix doesn't seem to have much else going for him here. He's locked himself into this rather grim and joyless story that's not so much supported as imprisoned by its structure: there are seven Keys, and Arthur will encounter and defeat seven Guardians. The Guardians are named after the days of the week (because they come in sevens) and epitomize the Seven Deadly Sins (ditto). I know Arthur will win, because that's how these things work: when was the last time you read a young adult fantasy where the young hero lost in the end? I know when he will win, because there have to be seven books. So why do I care?
Sometimes these things work out well anyway, because the author shows so much imagination and gives us such evocative and/or witty writing that the journey becomes more important than the destination. But unless the series is going to depart radically from these first two volumes, this isn't going to be one of those cases. The places that Arthur passes through are grim without being interesting, the perils are unpleasant and dangerous the way rush hour on the Beltway is unpleasant and dangerous, and the people he encounters there aren't particularly vivid or memorable: in fact, the only name that sticks with me is Suzy Turquoise Blue, a rather Dido Twite-ish urchin who shows up to help Arthur in both books.
Additionally, Nix's talent for naming things has once again reverted to the pedestrian level he showed in The Ragwitch: Nithlings is OK for the creatures "made of Nothing," but Fetchers is ugly and also sounds, well, stupid, like something I would have made up in a lets-pretend at the age of 8. What happened to the feel for language he showed in the "Abhorsen" trilogy?
So I have to give these a resounding meh. I don't even know whether I will bother to finish the series. I would love to read worthy successors to the "Abhorsen" books - but these aren't them.
