Book review: Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch

[lucymonster]

This is police procedural meets Harry Potter and every bit as fun as it sounds. Rookie London cop Peter Grant discovers that magic is real and gets recruited to the Met's paranormal taskforce, which up until his joining consisted of just one member: the mysteriously ageless Detective Inspector Thomas Nightingale, a trained wizard from a once-flourishing British magical tradition that was brought to near extinction during World War II. Under Nightingale's two-pronged guidance as senior officer and magic instructor, Peter sets about bringing the long arm of the law to bear on ghosts, goblins, vampires and black magicians.

I'm finding these books compulsively readable. I've swallowed the first four in quick succession, and they're only getting stronger as the series progresses. Book one was fun but shallow; book two was a bit of a mess; books three made me half-forget my complaints about book two; and book four was so powerful that I think I need to sit with it a while and digest before continuing my binge, but oh man, pausing is HARD. The series has been following your classic "monster of the week plus overarching big bad" structure, and the latter plot has picked up so much momentum at this point that it's all I can think about. There is SO MUCH action and excitement and cool worldbuilding happening, with lots of humour, flashes of violence and a pleasingly creepy sprinkle of magical body horror.

I will say that early on Aaronovitch is a bit weird about women, in an over-the-top horny way that hits me as benign but very off-putting. Peter has a lot of sex in book two, which is most of what makes that one a mess - but I guess he got some stuff out of his system, because the dick-brained nonsense tapers off sharply after that, and the female characters start to really shine in their own right. Lesley May is my precious darling beloved who has never done anything wrong in her life. I feel like me naming her as fave is a slight spoiler for anyone who knows how my tastes run, but what can I do?

I'll also say that I've needed my phone handy as I read to look up reference images and bits of architectural jargon. Aaronovitch is obsessed with London as a physical place, and spills quite a lot of ink describing its geography and urban environment. On the one hand, 'how old is this building' and 'what materials and methods were used in its fabrication' are not questions I generally find interesting for their own sake, especially not when alternative avenues of inquiry such as 'how does magic work' and 'I'm sorry, that demonic serial killer did WHAT to his latest victim?' are right there in front of me. But on the other hand, I thought this way of viewing the world really worked for Peter as a character: he's a young male cop with a procedural mindset, a high adrenaline tolerance, a keen eye for detail and a tin ear for all things emotional, so his ability to pick out the differences between late Victorian and early Edwardian terrace construction techniques while being chased by a supernatural thug with a Sten gun felt at least as much like authentic characterisation as authorial indulgence.

So, yeah, this is my new obsession. It doesn't have a lot of fannish potential for me personally (though I'd give a lot for some good fanart of Lesley) but there are a lot more books to go so I have plenty of canonical fun still waiting!

Comments

[rhoda_rants]

I have been curious about this series for years, so thanks for the rec! Definitely sounds like something I'd be into. I haven't really checked out urban fantasy in a while. Good to know the horniness is temporary!

[lucymonster]

By the end of book I was inching towards the “is this really worth it” point with the obnoxious horniness, but thankfully it eased off almost completely in book three! Hope you enjoy and would love to hear your thoughts if you end up reading. 😊

[rhoda_rants]

Gotcha. I do appreciate the forewarning!

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[sonofgodzilla]

*deep breath* My friend's boyfriend tells me that apparently he is very lovely! Without going into too much detail, my friend's boyfriend works behind the scenes for an Important Institution, and Aaronovitch came in and sat with him for a day and asked a lot of questions about the Romans, and what would happen if... &c.

I never read these books but I always meant to. I was really taken with his Doctor Who stories when I was younger and I always wanted to read these but I never did because I was like what if I read them and found out that this is stuff I would have liked to have done and I'm super envious.

I am glad that with more distance and more sense that you are enjoying them! There's a lot I want to say about how London... makes me you sort of mad as a writer, it tricks you into falling in love with it, and you can see that in Aaronovitch's work, you can see that in Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd and even Northampton's own Alan Moore, but I don't want to dump an essay on "psychogeorgraphy" in your comments. I think we're all kind of resolved to being the city's biographers though, I think that's what it is to live as a little fish in the jaws of the whale.

[lucymonster]

I'm so pleased to hear that about Aaronovitch! He definitely reads as someone who's done a lot of thinking and research. His use of Roman history gets really interesting in the later books - all the more interesting to me since Roman Britain never really featured much in my studies, so he's taught me a bunch of new things!

That's also really interesting about London and the response it provokes in writers. As an Australian, the entire Old World has a sort of otherworldly magic about it - of course our continent has a very ancient history, but colonisation was recent, so our civic institutions and buildings and so forth are all quite young and don't have anything like the mystique and historical layering of a city like London. The one time I saw a crime/thriller series set in our capital city, I honestly thought it was a bit of a joke. Cultural cringe is big here. We tend to share an unspoken feeling that our cities, while great to live in, aren't really worth making art about.

But I adored London the one time I visited (at age sixteen, I believe) and these books have thoroughly reignited my desire to come back.

[sonofgodzilla]

I can understand this romanticism of the Old World, because, in a way, we eat our own past. I think that's genuinely what has allowed right wing politics to become so dominant in recent times as the first rule of thumb with any of that shit is to sell an idea of a past that never was.

I would no doubt be wonderstruck about a book set in Canberra, but the shameful thing is that my understanding is so dim that I'd probably only understand it in the context of American works about American cities because I think we are inclined here to tar all English speaking former Dominion countries with the same brush in media, which I'm totally not saying is a good thing.

Not wanting to set stories in the place where you are from is something that is present outside of London here too, I think. It's only recently (recently: past four decades), and possibly prompted by production costs, that you see TV shows that admit to being set in Bristol, or Cardiff, or wherever, and it's just a fact of the setting not a novelty. London, famous for being a city obsessed with commerce, holds the lion's share of cultural currency.

Wow. I am rambling. What I actually meant to come here to say was: I really like your book posts!!

[verdande_mi]

I love this series. I was a bit meh with the first book, but everyone and the world just grew on me. I look forward to reading more in 2025.

[lucymonster]

The world and the system of magic have gotten more and more engrossing the more time I spend with them! I've just finished book seven which wraps up the main plotline, and I can't tell from the blurbs of later novels whether they're going to feature my favourite characters in any meaningful role - it felt like their arcs were pretty well wrapped up. I'm taking a breather either way to read some other things, but if Lesley comes back, so will I!