Han, in London

AND I HAVEN'T STOPPED CAPSLOCKING SINCE.

Oh. My. God, everyone, it was basically exactly what you'd want from a Spooks movie. It was RIDICULOUS. It was AMAZING. There were fights. A whooooole bunch of people got shot. People get questioned A LOT. Things went boom. London (love of my life) looked fantastic.

SO MANY SPOILERS AFTER THIS. DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU HAVE SEEN THE FILM. 

Also now I've linked to this on spooky_doings I feel obliged to say: 1) this is overexcited word vomit, not a sensible review and 2) I have a terrible memory and have probably got stuff in the wrong order/forgotten things. 
( SPOOKS SPOILERS ACTUALLY REALLY HAPPY I GET TO TYPE THOSE WORDS )

In conclusion: go see it, but go see it expecting a very long episode.

I found the Google docs I mentioned when I posted about my fic! Well done me.

Having finally posted a Rivers of London fic (which took forever to write), I thought I would talk a bit about a) the bits of London I used in the fic and b) London-based UF/horror book series I love.

I’ve been meaning to do a post or seven about Rivers of London for ages but never quite managed it because I could never quite get to a stage where I was able to be objective about the books (I think writing this fic finally did it for me because it was such a slog).

The books, by Ben Aaronovitch, focus on PC Peter Grant, a mixed race copper from North London (it shows) who accidentally finds out about magic and starts training to become a wizard under the tutelage of the only wizard police officer left in the UK (DCI Thomas Nightingale).

The mythology of the books is that after WW2 magic faded away, more or less, leaving just Nightingale (who is a lot older than he looks) and a few scattered practitioners, but it is gradually starting to come back.

Peter is an entertaining narrator, easily-distracted but funny and quick with a pop-culture reference. The supporting characters are usually intriguing with a big chunk of mystery in their backgrounds.

The main draw for me is that the author is really really good at portraying London, even if there is a bias towards everything North of the river (says someone just as biased towards SE London). The city in the books is very close to the city I know, and the way Peter feels and thinks about the city is pretty close to the way I feel about it (and London trivia spotters will have a great time reading the books and thinking ‘well yes but I already knew about Leinster Gardens’ etc etc).

There are currently five books in the series (I have yet to read the fifth), and apparently the fifth book takes Peter out of London, not that I know why you’d want to /only half joking.

The ROL series is not quite my favourite London-based urban fantasy series, however. That would be the Matthew Swift series of books by Kate Griffin. In this series, most of the sorcerers in London were killed two years before the series starts, and Matthew Swift (a sorcerer, which is apparently a bit different to a wizard) starts the series being brought back to life by the blue electric angels who live in the telephone lines.

Everything in Kate Griffin’s London has some sort of magic to it, from the magic of routine and rules (such as escaping from something chasing you by going through the ticket machines on the tube when it doesn’t have a valid ticket) to pulling power from the streetlights and everything upwards.

(where dryads in Rivers of London still live inside trees, in the Matthew Swift series they have moved to lampposts)

( cut for brief spoilers )
The reason I ended up liking Griffin’s series more is probably that she really covers all of London, having Matthew venture out over the sprawling suburbs instead of mostly sticking to the central boroughs. 

There are currently six books featuring Matthew, four where he is the central character and two in the Magicals Anonymous spin-off series, which focus on Sharon Li, a woman who finds out she’s a shaman who can become one with the city, and the group of people/supernatural beings who come to meetings after she puts a post up on Facebook.

Most recently I’ve read London Falling by Paul Cornell, which I think is due to become a series. I meant to write a review but never got round to it so I might as well do one here.

I didn’t like the book when I first started it - I had been saving it for months and had been expecting an instant love the same as I’d felt for ROL/Matthew Swift. I persevered, however, and by the end of the book I was really enjoying myself.

The characters in London Falling (three police officers and a data person) initially don’t get on with each other, which was one of the reasons I didn’t get on with it - I don’t expect everything to be sunshine and rainbows in my UF books, obviously, but I couldn’t work out why they seemed so reluctant to work together. By the end, though, the characters had been developed well enough that this didn’t bother me any more.

The characters in LF were all prickly and complicated in different ways, which I really liked. They only find out about/get involved with magic by accident and I thought that the ways they each dealt with this were interesting. ROL only really has to deal with Peter finding out about magic (and anyone else we hear about through him) so Cornell had quite a bit more work to do.

The plot of the book was nicely creepy, and the villian did some pretty horrific things - I think possibly this book is a bit closer to the horror end of things rather than urban fantasy (actually I’m not sure where the division would be). Sometimes the other series are a bit meandering without being particularly scary or creepy, but this book had some properly tense moments. I am looking forward to reading others in the series.

As a glancing final mention, there is of course the Felix Castor series by Mike Carey which predate all of these, but it’s been ages since I read them so all I can say is that I enjoyed those too and I’ve been meaning to do a reread (iirc they were also more down the horror end of the spectrum).

I’m sure there are others (lucky me, there’s always someone writing something magical set in London) so do let me know if I’ve missed anything.

I hesitate to call this a review, because even in the version in my head there’s a lot of tangents. And it’s not quite a rec (for reasons which will become obvious). So I’m calling it a ramble. 

Crishna brought this book down to Cornwall for me, and seeing as it was a) crime b) with a supernatural bent and c) set in London, I had to read it.

A Matter of Blood is the first book in the Dog-Faced Gods trilogy (which I nearly just typed as God-Faced Dogs, which would be something else entirely), set in a very near future where the global financial crisis was far more serious than the real one, and most of the world is now in hock to The Bank, a shady organisation.

The book follows Detective Inspector Cass Jones over two investigations, the shooting of two schoolboys and a serial killer who calls himself the Man of Flies and who likes leaving the words Nothing Is Sacred written in blood on his victims.

At the same time, his marriage is going down the pan (although the rot set in long before the start of the book, after an undercover operation that went very bad – we find out just how bad in flashbacks).

Ok, so that’s the setup, now we get into the spoilery discussion:

( spoilers ) 

Tl; dr - in reading this book I found out my limit for depressing shit is, actually, Luther. Good to know.

Just wanted to post these links as I'm actually getting on with posting photos lately...

Barbican Conservatory - metropolithan.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/barbican-conservatory.html

Steam train on the tube - metropolithan.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/steam-train-on-tube.html

Empty London - pictures of London without any people (not just the big central bits, residential streets, Docklands etc) - emptylondon.tumblr.com/

I have A LOT of photos of various things. I have no idea why this is surprising to me. 

(NB in case anyone is wondering about the 2012 photos of the day, I did manage to take photos almost every day - I was without a camera for 9 days or something when my old one died - but a lot of them are on the hard drive, which is currently in a coma, so I will try to get round to posting the ones I *have* got eventually. Um.)