Cassandra Clare, City of Bones (McElderry Books, 2007)
When City of Bones arrived this week, I had forgotten that I had asked the publicist for McElderry Books at Simon & Schuster for an ARC of this forthcoming YA novel. (That is not an indication of what I thought of the novel itself -- it reflects the fact that we ask, for and receive, more books than you want to really think about. Not quite grains of sand on an infinite beach but close sometimes.)
It only took reading a chapter to remind me why I wanted to read it. It is that ever-so-rare rare creature these days -- well-crafted YA fiction where at least some of the teenagers are both likable and believable. It is possible for this to happen, but I've found that most adult writers just aren't that good at creating characters that are not the same age as themselves. (I find that most conceptualised immortals suffer from the same lack of imagination.) Holly Black does it exceeding well in Tithe, as does Guy Gavriel Kay in Ysabel, and there are others, such as Susan Cooper in her Dark is Rising series, but handling contemporary youth well is a difficult task.
That is a great novel is without question. As Holly Black told me in the Pub recently while we were discussing her forthcoming novel, Ironside, what she liked about this novel was 'What I love about City of Bones is that Cassie is able to write a book that is simultaneously really funny and heart-wrenching. Plus I have a serious crush on Luke'. (Luke is one of the adult characters in the novel.) Like Holly, I found Luke and the other characters here to be worth being involved with as a reader.
What this first book in the Mortal Instruments Trilogy, is about is best explained by the author herself. Here's her take on the novel as excerpted from an interview Holly Black did with her in 2006:
City of Bones is an urban fantasy about a fifteen-year old girl named Clary Fray, whose search for her missing mother leads her into an alternate New York called Downworld, filled with mysterious faeries, hard-partying warlocks, not-what-they-seem vampires, an army of werewolves, and the demons who want to destroy it all. She also finds herself torn between two boys -- her best friend, Simon, for whom she's developing new feelings, and the mysterious demon hunter, Jace. She becomes a part of the secret world of the demon hunters, or Nephilim, and as she does she discovers that rescuing her mother might mean putting their whole world in jeopardy.
She goes to explain the concept of the conflict in this series:
The world of the Mortal Instruments is posited on the idea that there are demons, humans and angels -- demons who want to destroy our world, angels who want to protect it, and the Nephilim who do the angels' work on earth, who are these warriors with this mandate to protect this world from the demon worlds. The Downworlders are those who don't fit into those three categories: they are Warlocks, who are the offspring of demons and humans and can therefore do magic, and faeries who are part angel and part demon, not to mention various other supernatural crossbreeds. The job of the Nephilim is also to watch over Downworld and make sure it doesn't get too messy and contentious, but it's always full of infighting, and the Nephilim look down on the Downworlders. I was thinking of parallels to our world in the sense that I wanted to capture this bitter fighting between groups of people who have created these divisions between themselves based on differences so slight that they're incomprehensible to anyone not involved in the conflict -- but to those who are involved, they're everything.
Clary is a more or less normal almost fifteen year-old girl who quite suddenly discovers everything she thought was true is a lie. Indeed her world is but an aspect of a much larger, more deadly reality where things do go bump in the night. (Stop here if you don't like spoilers!!!) Her mother, member of a race of beings fighting those things that go bump in the night, has had her memory magically erased so that she has no idea what her real past is -- down to and including the fact that she's a shadowwalker. Clare has riffed off the slayers in the Buffyverse rather nicely, as she notes in her interview:
[T]he Shadowhunters aren't part of any specific religion or culture. They're all over the world, just like demons are -- there's no culture on earth that doesn't have some myth of evil spirits. Some are aspects of existing gods, as in Indian and Persian myths, and some are agents of some overwhelming evil force that opposes a single god, as in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism -- while in Native American mythology they often personify the destructive aspects of the natural world, like earthquakes.
Shadowhunters clearly think they're superior to the humans they've sworn to protect, and most of them consider the Fallen to be little better than scum good only for killing. Imagine Clary's shock at finding out that nightmares are really real. And that those fighting the good fight aren't nearly as blame-free for what's happening. The center's definitely not holding in Clary's world!
When the young Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City to party like any normal teenager, she never expects to witness a murder -- a murder that is committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. A murder where both victim and the killers are quite literally out of sight for everyone else! Not even the blood of the dead 'boy' is left to show anything was there. Thus goes her first not terribly pleasant encounter with the Shadowhunters, the aforementioned warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons. Need I say that they too are teenagers? Stone cold killers, yes -- but still teenagers. Only they -- and Clary who shouldn't be able to, as she's just a human -- have The Sight to see those Things That Go Bump in The Night.
One of whom is Jace, who is sexy as hell, but also more or less an asshole. (told you that the characters are realistic.) Over the next twenty-four hours, Clary will reluctantly become hopelessly intertwined with Jace's reality as her mother will disappear, a nasty demon will attack her, and things just keep getting weirder. Before this novel reaches its ending point (of sorts), Clary will get used to sexy teen-aged boys covered in tattoos, really cool flying motorcycles powered by things best not thought about, awesomely cool weapons, werewolves who are allies in the Shadowwalker's war, vampires who most decidedly are not friendly, flirtations with being in love, lessons about the dangers of finding out what you didn't know, and much more. It this a fast-paced novel? Yes indeed. Is a good set-up for the next two novels in the series? Quite so. And quite original as well. Though Clare lists her influences as Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings trilogy, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series, and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, it feels like none of those excellent writings, as it is contemporary urban fantasy. Good work, Cassandra Clare!
