Bartimaeus’s Voice and Ptolemy’s Gate

Many of the good reviews for Ptolemy’s Gate mention the voice of Bartimaeus the djinni: potent, boastful, and not entirely reliable; complaining and condescending in equal measures; serving up a stew of modern idioms and ancient allusions, spotted with footnoted asides for the (supposed) benefit of our ignorant mortal selves. Author Jonathan Stroud has provided an extra helping of that voice in a short story on his website.

Stroud remarked on his choices in narrative voices in a fascinating interview with author Michael Pryor that the State Library of Victoria, Australia, has made available in both podcast and transcript forms. Stroud told his audience:

I realised quite early on that I think of Bartimaeus as a voice, if that’s possible. Rather than as any kind of physical form. I realised that when the Miramax Disney people, who were hoping to make a movie out of it, asked me who I saw playing Bartimaeus. They wanted Bartimaeus to be played by an adult, so when he takes on the form of Ptolemy as a 12 year old, in the film it would be Ptolemy as an adult. So they could get a famous person playing it. Once I got my head around that idea, which I can see makes commercial sense, I found it really hard, and I’m still quite puzzled, who would I choose?

Bartimaeus’s lack of physical form, even in a Disney movie, makes sense of another nifty element of the narration in his sections of the books: it’s both first-person and third-person. The djinni speaks of himself quite proudly as “I,” but often refers to the earthly forms he assumes as if he weren’t actually inside them: “the crow,” “the boy,” “the frog,” and so on.

And then there are the sections of each book about young Nathaniel and Kitty, both humans. (There’s also a single chapter in the second volume from the point of view of a lesser spirit named Simpkin; Bartimaeus would assure us that we needn’t think any more about him.) Many books have multiple narrators, but usually each can be identified as a character, both to preserve parallelism and to avoid raising questions in readers’ minds. In that approach, Nathaniel would have narrated his own experiences from book one.

Instead, Stroud chose to tell the boy’s story in the detached third person. That not only gives us a respite from Bartimaeus’s mouth (letting absence make us fonder), but it also seems to reflect Nathaniel’s clinical, almost heartless approach to life. In Stroud’s words:

I soon realized that I couldn’t have the whole series in Bartimaeus’ voice because although he is quite charismatic and an attractive guy to be with, if he was talking at you for page upon page upon page you quickly get a bit peeved. A bit like being trapped by an over-excitable guest at a party, you would want to slip away eventually. And it was quite important to bring in Nathaniel’s side of things where it is done in the third person and its much more kind of cool, a bit detached.

I had a little trouble with that shift at first; was Bartimaeus narrating Nathaniel’s story, I wondered, and if so where were all his footnotes? But I adjusted quickly enough. And that approach works excellently at the end of Ptolemy’s Gate when some of the narrative threads we’ve been following will come to an end.

Yes, Ptolemy's Gate Is That Good

When I agreed to be a judge for the first Cybils Award for Fantasy and Science Fiction, I rather hoped that this new blogocentric process would produce a gem that had been overlooked by other awards. I think the organizers did, too, since they were inspired in part by dismay at Bowker’s Quill Awards, which seem designed to reward established popularity rather than literary quality.

Maybe we’d honor an excellent book from a small publisher that hadn’t broken through in stores yet. Or a fantasy that had great literary merit but was passed over for prestigious honors because it was fantasy and thus didn’t quite fit the profile of the sort of book that deserved such recognition. Cybils to the rescue!

But we ended up giving the award to a book that’s already been a bestseller around the world, on the lists from the New York Times Book Review, USA Today, and Book Sense. A book that was called one of the best of the year by Child magazine, Booklist, and The Horn Book. A book that won the CORINE Youth Book Award (that seems to be big in Germany--who knew?). A book that was even nominated for one of those Quill Awards.

I see a couple of reasons for that. With Fantasy and Science Fiction getting so much more attention from publishers, critics, and readers these days, it would be hard for a good book in that category to fly under the radar. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cybils honorees in other categories include undiscovered gems--at least titles that aren’t yet bestsellers.

The other reason is that Ptolemy’s Gate deserves every award it gets. Man, it’s good! It was my clear favorite not only among the Cybils nominees in this category, but among all the novels I recall reading in the past year. As far as I can tell, almost every other member of the judging and nominating committees ranked it at or near the top of their lists as well.

Ptolemy’s Gate is the third book in a trilogy, and I hadn’t read the first two. So I lined up a young Bartimaeus Trilogy expert to help me when I got lost. But Jonathan Stroud’s writing enabled me to pick up the details of his world as I went along; I called on my expert about only one point after I’d finished the book--I didn’t want to stop.

Now I’ve bought the first two books in the series, The Amulet of Samarkand and The Golem’s Eye, and started to read from the beginning. And I’m even more impressed by how Stroud introduced his world and his first two main characters, and slipped in foreshadowings of the third book’s crucial moments. Yet the third story also takes place at a different level from the first: the characters are older, there’s more at stake, there’s a higher playing field.

Ptolemy’s Gate is more than good--it’s brilliant. And I don’t just mean the British “brilliant.” I stumbled into this example of our nations being divided by a common language a few years ago when I stayed in a house in Oxford. I mentioned having done some minor task on my way there, and my hostess responded, “Right, brilliant.”

Brilliant? I thought. It really wasn’t amazing, I reminded myself, trying to maintain what little modesty I command. But after a bit I realized that in American my hostess would simply have said, “Okay, great”--quick assent and approval, nothing special, now let’s move on.

So when I call Ptolemy’s Gate a brilliant fantasy novel, I’m writing as an American. It’s luminescently smart and inventive, it’s a nifty idea wonderfully realized, it’s an exciting read that also makes you think, it’s a wonderful example of how to structure and narrate a complex story. It’s that good.

Now if only I’d listened to my expert’s praise for this series years ago.

Cybils Award for Fantasy/Sci Fi to Ptolemy's Gate

Today’s official announcement from the Cybils site:

Ptolemy’s Gate receives the first Cybils for Fantasy and Science Fiction for its richly imagined fantasy world, strongly realized and unique characters, delightful language and well-honed plot. As a concluding volume of a trilogy, it delivers everything a final volume should do, taking the story arc to its peak with a climax that is both action-packed and emotionally charged. At the same time, Ptolemy’s Gate stands alone as a story and will inspire readers, children and adults alike, to seek out the previous installments and revisit the world of Bartimaeus over and over again.

Here is author Jonathan Stroud’s website. Here is Hyperion’s website for the series. I’ll post more of my thoughts on this book in days to come, but right now I want to thank the Cybils organizing committee and the Fantasy/Sci Fi nominating committee for making me read it at last, and my fellow judges in this category for an insightful discussion of all the nominated titles.

Divided by a Common Language at Ptolemy's Gate

This week's example of an untranslated British term comes from Ptolemy’s Gate, by Jonathan Stroud. Contemplating the prospect of entering a human’s body, the genie Bartimaeus says: “Well, I'm not too enamored of being encased inside your earthly gunge.”

The Miramax/Hyperion edition has changed the British spelling of “enamoured,” but left in “gunge.” The word’s unsavory implications are evident from Bartimaeus’s attitude, not to mention the way the word sounds. But what exactly is “gunge”?

As British slang, “gunge” dates only to the 1960s--far less ancient than Bartimaeus (but one hallmark of his narrative voice is that he uses contemporary idioms more than anyone else). Worthless Word for the Day has explained that “gunge” means:

any messy or clogging substance, esp. one considered otherwise unidentifiable; also, general rubbish, clutter, filth

The word gained its popularity through the modern media--specifically, television. UK-based experts trace the phenomenon to the comic genii of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and their 1965-70 TV series Not Only...But Also:

Moore and Cook set about developing sequences of lively comedy sketches linked by musical interludes and other set-piece events variously featuring themselves or guests. Among the most successful of these latter items was Poets Cornered, in which invited comedians were required to compose (without hesitation) instant rhyming poems, or risk being plunged into a vat of gunge--the first appearance of the so-called “gunge tanks” that became such a feature of zany quiz shows and children's programmes in the 1980s and 1990s. Among those to brave the gunge were Frank Muir, Spike Milligan and Barry Humphries.

British gunge came to the US via Canada, but under a different name. In the mid-1970s an Englishman named Roger Price created some Thames Television comedy sketch shows for kids with semi-professional young actors called You Must Be Joking and You Can't Be Serious. Then he moved to Ottawa, that center of culture, and recreated the formula with a show eventually titled You Can't Do That on Television.

Ah, you remember that, you children of the 1980s! Price’s odd, low-rent series became the first big hit on the Nickelodeon cable channel. It featured gunge falling from the ceiling, but under a new name: “slime.” That word and substance then became a hallmark of the Nickelodeon brand, inspiring a “slime fountain” in Orlando and shows like Slime Time Live. So when Bartimaeus says “gunge,” Americans should think “slime.”

Gunge apparently continues to be a staple of British children's television, leading to this curious adjudication, which I came across while Googling--excuse me, researching this topic. In 2004 there was a dispute over a BBC TV show called Dick and Dom in da [sic] Bungalow:

James Walsh, who is 11 years old, was one of a number of children competing for prizes in this programme. During the programme, James was “gunged”, that is covered in food. He lost the final word memory game to another contestant, who was given a second chance by the presenter after getting a word wrong. This resulted in James losing the entire competition.

Mr Michael Walsh, James’ father, complained on his behalf that his son was treated unfairly in the programme.

And they say we Americans are litigious.