kindkit | Rivers of London

I've now read all three of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels and liked them a lot. The magic element is creatively handled and plausible (there are limitations on its use, and I love protagonist Peter Grant's ongoing attempts to find out how the hell it works, e.g. where the power to fuel magic comes from thermodynamically). The style is engaging and witty, and there's an enjoyable element of pop-culture savvy, as when Peter, lamenting the lack of a device to measure magic traces, notes that among many other current scientific endeavors "clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop." Peter is likeable, complex, wide-rangingly intelligent, and has a deep fundamental decency which means, for example, that he does not have sex with his female friend when she makes a drunken pass at him. The secondary characters are also appealing, especially Peter's boss and magic teacher Thomas Nightingale (the last surviving properly trained English wizard, a man with a long, sometimes tragic history) and Peter's colleague, friend, and sharer-in-UST Lesley (sometimes Leslie, depending on which book) May, a good cop who's tough without being a stereotypical ass-kicking chick and vulnerable without being weak.

I don't really read for plot, but the RoL plots are strong enough (except perhaps for Whispers Underground) to keep me hooked even though most of my attention is on characterization and worldbuilding.

Mostly, as you can see, I think the books are awesome. But I do have a couple of reservations. One is that Peter occasionally reads as, well, a character of color written by a white liberal. There are moments when I seem to feel the ghostly presence of the author saying "hey, see how well and non-racistly I've written my protagonist?". But then, I'm a white liberal myself, and since the books talk about race in ways that genre fiction by white authors typically doesn't (first by having characters of color at all, second by talking about racism as an ongoing factor in the characters' lives, and third by consistently refusing to let the reader treat whiteness as the default--in other words it's not just the characters of color whose race is mentioned), it may partly be my own reactions that I'm feeling, the fact that the books make me aware of race and racism in a way that sff seldom does.

My second point is that I think the novels could do a better job of including queer characters. There's one recurring but minor character who's a lesbian (and who is pretty stereotyped, and I'm not sure the fact that the narrative lampshades her stereotypical-ness helps much). Otherwise, the characters identified as queer have all played very minor roles, bisexuality doesn't seem to exist, and the supernatural world (e.g. the rivers and the underground dwellers) is utterly, blithely heteronormative. It's true that Thomas Nightingale's sexuality has not been defined, and there are a number of reasons to believe he might be gay, but it feels irritatingly like a tease to me. I am, unfortunately, very used to having this kind of drawn-out hinting end with an assertion of the character's heterosexuality (Lewis and Sanctuary, I'm looking at you), so it tends to make me cranky and anxious rather than intrigued. It worries me especially because I love, love, love Thomas, with his stiff upper lip hiding his loneliness and grief and wartime trauma, his old-fashionedness, his deep but manfully repressed affection for Peter (which is mutual and leads to me flailing over Peter squeezing Thomas's hand in the hospital, or their awkward exchange of Christmas presents). And I know I will love him less if Aaronovitch decides to make him straight: I am unapologetic about my emotional engagement with queer (gay, in particular) male characters.

There's also, in the second book, a painful moment of trans* fail. I wouldn't call it transphobic, exactly, but headdesky and DOING IT WRONG.

So . . . good books which I like more than anything I've read in a while, but they could be better, and unfortunately the problems are in areas that I find especially important.

I hope this will improve in subsequent books. In the mean time, NEEDS MOAR FANFIC.