Bartimaeus Flattened on the Page

Andrew Donkin shares credit for the script of the Amulet of Samarkand graphic novel with Jonathan Stroud, just as he shared credit for the Artemis Fowle adaptation with Eoin Colfer.

I thought the Artemis Fowle comic was very good, equal or perhaps even better than the novel. However, I thought the comics adaptation of the first Bartimaeus novel was merely a flattened version of the original.

The Samarkand art, by draftsman Lee Sullivan and colorist Nicolas Chapuis, is just fine. Their pictures of a magical London are terrific; I especially like the way their London Eye has the five-pointed pentagram inside it. I found it somewhat difficult to follow how old Nathaniel was in different scenes as the narrative flashed back and forth, but that really points to the larger problem in this adaptation.

Colfer’s Artemis Fowle was practically made for the comics form. The narrative voice is an omniscient, detail-oriented third person. The conflict is built on opposing teams with clear goals. The narrative is built up from plot twists in the physical world rather than realizations in the mental one. The characters cover a broad range of physical types, with corresponding personalities.

In contrast, Stroud’s Bartimaeus books are a triumph of narration. There’s Bartimaeus’s own voice, with its boasts and footnotes, which brief comics captions can barely replicate. That voice helps us follow the djinn through his shapeshifting and world-jumping while in the graphic format we have to see Bartimaeus from the outside.

The novel’s other, third-person narrative voice shows us Nathaniel growing up and working his schemes. It provides the sense of distance useful for an anti-hero while letting us into his head as he thinks and rethinks.

The narration also keeps the timing of different scenes distinct. In the comics version, there’s a short sepia-toned flashback to when Nathaniel was very little, but all the other scenes unfold before us looking like the present, differentiated only by captions saying NOW and BEFORE.

Indeed, I wonder if this form would have worked better if it started at Chapter 11, “The Day Everything Changed”; using Nathaniel’s confrontation with Simon Lovelace to fill us in on the boy’s background and world; and then proceeding chronologically. That approach would have kept Bartimaeus off the stage for longer. However, if we can’t hear his voice in all its glory, it’s unfortunately not such a loss.

Political Authority in Children’s Fantasy

Political scientist Jay Ulfelder just wrote about the prevalence of monarchs in children’s fantasy:

In every major book or series I can think of–Harry Potter, the Percy Jackson books, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Gregor the Overlander series–political authority either resides in monarchies or is controlled by some other self-selected group of elites, often with special powers.

A few of the books we’ve read [in the family] have raised tough questions about these authoritarian arrangements and the injustices they entail. Right now, for example, I’m reading the excellent Bartimaeus trilogy to my sixth grader and appreciating the story of popular resistance against a tyrannical aristocracy of greedy magicians. Most of the time, though, poor governance is implicitly blamed on flaws in the character of individual leaders. Villains bring us down, and heroes make things right. Institutions, it seems, are irrelevant.

As a scholar of democratization and a liberal by political philosophy, I really don’t like the message this pattern sends to my kids. Governance is a very hard and perpetual problem, and the parade of gods, kings, and magicians traipsing through kids’ fiction reinforces the authoritarian fantasy that benevolent dictators offer an elegant solution. I realize that fiction isn’t meant to mimic reality, and I understand how these struggles between powerful beings of good and evil make a terrific scaffolding for storytelling. Still, I can’t help but wonder how this steady diet of government by kings and wizards prepares kids to make sense of the politics they will encounter as they grow up.

That’s because those fantasies don’t replicate the larger democratic society in which most of their readers are living. They reflect the smaller, more dictatorial societies of family and school, with rules set by “self-selected group of elites, often with special powers,” called adults.

Furthermore, most children’s novels in any mode focus on individual characters and their choices in life. As a result, they present a world in which individual morality is crucial, pushing institutional structures into the background.

That pattern affects even stories which explicitly promote democratic values, such as the Harry Potter and Star Wars series. Both of those sagas show parliamentary governments in action. However, those institutions appear ineffectual, and dependent on an elite of innately powerful individuals.

“The gates of magic were open to everyone…”

This afternoon I happened to be thinking about how L. Frank Baum portrayed Dorothy in his Oz books as an “ordinary little girl,” not inherently magical or unlike her readers. Of course, if she got her hands on the Magic Belt, watch out!

That presents a world of possibility fundamentally different from what’s proffered in series like Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson. Those portray an innate, unbreachable divide between people who can work magic and those who can’t.

Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus books depict a situation in between, a world where some people are have natural magical aptitude but—to the magicians’ dismay—“ordinary” humans can break the barrier.

This evening I found that novelist David Liss has been pondering the same issues in an essay at io9:

In my research, what I found most interesting was how common and ordinary magic was to people in the past. There was also dark and mysterious magic, which was part of a hidden world populated by unknowable beings, but mostly there was ordinary, routine magic that was incorporated into everyday life. It was part of this world and part of nature, and most people didn't trouble themselves too much with how or why it worked. That it did work was taken for granted.

In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan. Anyone could learn magic as long as he or she had access to the knowledge or could make a connection with the right supernatural entity. The important point is that in theory, the gates of magic were open to everyone, and what I find most interesting is how that has changed in popular culture. . . .

Magic has gone from being an open system to a closed one. Their massive popularity make the Harry Potter novels and films the most glaring example, but it's everywhere, and has been for decades now: TV shows like Charmed and Wizards of Waverly Place, books like those of Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. More often than not, magical practitioners are born, not made. Magic is an exclusive club. You can watch and be envious, but you can't join.

I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect the turning point is the TV show Bewitched.

Of course, that show was inspired by the 1942 film I Married a Witch, itself adapted from the novel The Passionate Witch, and the 1958 film Bell, Book, and Candle. All three use innate magic as a metaphor for the power a woman might sacrifice in marrying. The theme of innate, unobtainable powers has been around for a long time. What may be new is the dominance of one approach over others.

In response to Liss’s essay, Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress writes, “I wonder if a sense of biological magic also correlates to a sense of unease about how much power we have to impact our lives and to change the world”—by which she means how little power. Of course, kids fantasize about getting the call to Hogwarts or Camp Half-Breed, not being left behind.

More Bartimaeus? Too Much Bartimaeus?

I saw Publishers Weekly reporting that Jonathan Stroud has two new Bartimaeus books on the way. I loved reading the Bartimaeus trilogy, but I wasn’t sure which new title bothered me more.

One is a comics adaptation of The Amulet of Samarkand, written by Stroud and Andrew Donkin, who also scripted the Artemis Fowl comics with Eoin Colfer. I liked the first Fowl comic better than the corresponding novel; that story’s strengths played to the potentials of the comics form and its weaknesses recessed a bit.

In contrast, I like the Bartimaeus novels very much, and don’t see how all their strengths can make the jump. Comics are a good medium for shifting points of view, but not necessarily for such profoundly changing narrative voices. And the story is so much bigger than Artemis Fowl’s siege. Check out this preview.

In addition, PW reported that Stroud will publish a fourth novel in his series, The Ring of Solomon, in November. I thought the original trilogy was excellently structured, and couldn’t really see that story being stretched into a foursome. I worried that I might have contributed to the problem by passing over Stroud’s non-Bartimaeus books, pushing him back to the well.

But Monica Edinger assures us all that the upcoming Ring of Solomon is:

• a prequel, with Bartimaeus at work about three thousand years ago.
• about a new heroine and a whole new set of humans.
• very good.

Models of Magical Law Enforcement

My recent return to the world of Artemis Fowl left me thinking about magical law-enforcement. It's widely recommended that fantasy authors figure out how magic works in the worlds they create, communicate those processes and limits to readers, and then stick to them. So rules of magic are part of nearly all fantasies.

But rules against magic that characters could do but shouldn't are another matter. These, too, have a long history, back to the sorcerer's apprentice and beyond.

Sometimes such laws are given the force of government, as when Princess Ozma of Oz forbids her subjects from practicing magic, excepting only Glinda and the Wizard--and herself--and Dorothy, when she needs to--and her other friends, come to think of it. Hmmm.

Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci is also a magical law enforcer and fixer, though his source of authority is not exactly clear. This is an aristocratic model of government: a carefully educated strong man chosen for his power, passing down his title and property (though not within his family).

In recent years, magical regulation has become more bureaucratic. We met the feckless Ministry of Magic in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, a branch of the British civil service headed by a politically minded wizard. Harry and his friends get a close-up look at its workings in HP7, when they penetrate its headquarters in disguise, and that book's epilogue tells us that as adults they basically seize its levers of power.

We also encountered an entire magical government of Great Britain in Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. In these books, wizards don't serve a non-magical Prime Minister but hold the ministries themselves, oppressing the commoners who can't work magic and the genies who actually perform all the spells.

All these models of magical law enforcement involve human magicians regulating other humans. Magical creatures, even sentient ones, basically remain above (or below) any law but nature's. A genie or giant might have to be suppressed here and there, but no one expects magical creatures to significantly adapt their behavior to society. After all, such creatures are basically embodiments of mysterious natural forces.

Which brings me back to Artemis Fowl. In that novel Eoin Colfer shows us all the bureaucratic rivalries and back-biting of the Bartimaeus books, the abject concern for public relations and petty rules of the Ministry of Magic. But in Colfer's world, the law enforcers are fairies themselves. They have natural laws they must follow, but they also have rules they've decided on for their protection and enforce ruthlessly. Far from being beyond human-style politics, they're in the thick of it. No wonder the series leaves some readers dyspeptic.

The British Empires' Rebellious Colonies

Earlier this week I wrote about the rebirth of the British Empire in Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus series and Philip Reeve’s Larklight (which will officially become a series in October). I harped on how both authors seem to shy away from awkward elements of the real UK’s imperial history: oppression of peoples in south Asia and Africa, border-drawing in the Mideast, trade wars in China, etc.

But there’s one region of the old British Empire that Stroud and Reeve have no problem depicting under the control of their fantastic Londons. And what part would that be? America!

The mere mention of American colonies signals that each book occurs in a fantasy world, of course. Nevertheless, America remains a source of rebellion and trouble for Britain. In the Cybils-winning Ptolemy’s Gate, a North American war for independence is draining the resources of the magicians’ regime in London, just as the nascent USA’s revolution did for Lord George Germain’s government around 1780. It’s unclear at the end of the book whether a more democratic government in London would maintain that struggle, give it up, or reach some accommodation with the rebels.

In Larklight, young narrator Art Mumby writes of American colonies in the first pages, indicating that they’re still firmly part of Britain's Empire in this 1851. But later, when discussing who’s tried to steal away Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemical secrets, Art lists “Frenchmen and Russians and rebel Americans.” The first two were Britain’s rivals for influence in the early 1800s (before the emergence of a united Germany), but the last reflects a perception of the American character that extends even into this fantasy world.

I can’t help but see a bit of national wish-fulfillment in how these books show Britain still ruling America, especially in a decade when many people on both sides of the Atlantic have perceived the opposite. The American market has been very lucrative for British fantasy authors, but there’s bound to be a little ambivalence, isn’t there?

Bartimaeus and the British Empire

In the past year I’ve written about nationalist themes in an Irish fantasy series and an American fantasy series. But what of the British, who so dominate the genre? Does any nationalist self-fashioning poke through in their fantasy novels?

Jonathan Stroud has acknowledged one quality he finds characteristically British in his Bartimaeus trilogy. This is a bit from the terrific discussion at the State Library of Victoria that I pointed to earlier:

Michael Pryor: Now the Bartimaeus trilogy is interestingly a very political novel with the magicians, the non-magicians disenfranchised. So there is a class struggle going on here between the aristocratic magicians and the commoners. It’s British socialism? Is this a reaction to Thatcher’s ’80s? What’s going on here?

Stroud: Well, it--yes, it probably is, actually. Yes, I think that somebody did note that all British books, certainly all British children’s books, you can look at in terms of the class system and it’s definitely true.

In that exchange the two authors refer to the books’ struggle between magicians and commoners which culminates in a democratic rebellion against the magical oligarchy, and specifically to the rivalry between protagonists Nathaniel and Kitty.

But in fact the deepest conflict in the Bartimaeus books isn’t between magician and commoner but between magician and djinni. And I’d say that’s not so much a class system as a colonial one. The wizards exploit the resources and bodies of the djinn they can control. Those djinn are a different race of being from an Other Place, ancient and yet bound to serve their British masters.

It’s notable that Bartimaeus and his magical peers include no leprechauns, elves, ogres, or the other enchanting creatures from European fairy tales. He doesn’t tell many stories about Arthur, Archimedes, Daedalus, Roland, Siegfried, Heracles, or other European heroes of the distant past. Instead, Bartimaeus talks at length about Gilgamesh of Mesopotamia, Solomon of Israel, Ptolemy of Egypt. He speaks of tasks in Uruk (Sumer), Karnak (Egypt), and--when forced to--Jericho (Palestine). The amulet that provides the title for the first book comes from Uzbekistan.

The main “made in Europe” exceptions to that pattern are the mercenary’s seven-league boots and the golems of The Golem’s Eye--but the latter are a Jewish legend, outside the European mainstream. Bartimaeus gets busy in Europe only during the Renaissance: Faust, Tycho Brahe, Tower of Pisa, Prague as capital of the Holy Roman Empire. He also refers to work in eastern North America at unspecified times, but really his heart and history lie in what we used to call the Near East and now call the Mideast.

Those roots are apparent in the terms Bartimaeus and his peers use to describe themselves. The words djinni, afrit, and marid all come from pre-Islamic Arabic. They appear in the Koran, and “genie” came into western culture through literary translations, not folktales. (“Imp” is Germanic, on the other hand, but its magical meaning is a late arrival, less than half a millennium old.)

Despite his books’ picture of British governors exploiting Asian power, Stroud seems to steer away from addressing parallels to real history. In resurrecting the British Empire as a magical superpower, he emphasizes its power over continental Europe and North America only. The Golem’s Eye depicts a Czech immigrant underclass in London, but we never see the Asian, African, and Caribbean minorities of today’s Britain. The Amulet of Samarkand makes a brief mention of weavers in Basra toiling to create a magnificent carpet, but the books aren’t clear about whether their British Empire is contiguous with “all the pink bits” that used to appear on British school maps. Perhaps that past is too recent and too awkward.

A conflicted attitude toward the British Empire may help to explain the series’ emphasis on William E. Gladstone. In the trilogy, he’s the greatest of British magicians and Prime Ministers, the conqueror of the Continent, the man who imprisoned marids in his staff. In real life, Gladstone was a domestic reformer who also came to back home rule in Ireland; he opposed most of his rival Benjamin Disraeli’s imperialism toward India and the Near East.

In the end, of course, the Bartimaeus trilogy is not imperialistic. Stroud’s political sympathies clearly lie with the djinn and commoners, not the magicians who built and run the empire. The series ends hopefully with the prospect of political reform for the humans in Britain, which might also lead to less exploitation of the beings from the Other Place. And, as I wrote before, the voice that dominates the series is that of Bartimaeus, one of the exploited. Therefore, I believe Stroud’s trilogy can fairly be grouped with other British post-colonial fiction.

TOMORROW: The British Empire revived another way in Larklight.

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.