Confession time: I’ve not read very much classic science fiction. As a kid, I was always more into dragons and wizards than space ships and aliens, and as an adult I find I’m just not often interested in reading books that are older than I am. Still, Arthur C. Clarke is one of the greats, Childhood’s End is one of my partner’s favorite books, and it’s getting a miniseries on SyFy later this year, so I felt like it was time to read this one.
I’m glad I did, although it was many of the things that I expected. It’s somewhat simplistic, the characters are rather shallow, and its politics are dated at best. I can see why Childhood’s End is a classic, though. It’s an excellent novel, a fairly quick read, and has some ideas that stand the test of time really well. This makes it an all around worthwhile read for anyone who really loves science fiction.
So, to start with, I hadn’t realized exactly how old this book was. When I started it, I was thinking it was from the 1960s, but it was actually published in 1953. This explains some of the weirdness early in the book, which almost reads as if it’s about the Cold War and the Space Race, but which couldn’t have been. While 1953 was early in the Cold War, the Space Race wouldn’t start for another two years, although apparently in 1953 Clarke didn’t see humanity making it to space before the mid-70s.
Although I don’t read much sci-fi from this period, I always find it entertaining to see what these older writers thought the future would look like then. The flip side of this, though, is that sometimes they were just dead wrong. For example, in a kind of throwaway mention early in the book, Clarke describes white people in South Africa as an oppressed minority by 1975, and I would love to go back in time and pick his brain about what made him think that. By 1953, South Africa was already five years into the apartheid that wouldn’t end until 1994.
Another interesting, if expected, thing about this book and Clarke’s vision of the future is that, like many of the men who wrote science fiction in the mid 20th century, Clarke seems perfectly capable of imagining a future in which humanity sheds all its puritanical sexual mores, but he didn’t imagine a future where women’s liberation happened. There are only a couple of women in Childhood’s End, and they are barely even characters at all. Maia Boyce’s single trait is being really beautiful. Jean Morrel is somewhat more important, but she’s basically a sort of 1950s housewife whose husband can’t be bothered to be “in love with” until the world is literally ending. Apparently post-1990 publications of the book have made one of the astronauts in the first chapter a woman, but not the copy of the book that I read.
Regarding race, Clarke’s dream of the future is even more frustrating. Like many sort of clueless white dudes, he seemed to think that racial slurs would survive into a post-racism world but that they would somehow just kind of magically lose their negative connotations. Which is just not how language works, and betrays a really weird fantasy, in my opinion, of being able to still be just as racist as ever except no one complains about it anymore.
At the same time, though, perhaps the most important character in Childhood’s End is a black man, Jan Rodricks, who is the only human to see the Overlords’ home world and survives to chronicle the last days of the planet Earth. Jan is written in a way that is non-stereotypical, and by the end of the book one definitely gets the feeling that Jan comes closest of any of the characters in Childhood’s End to being Arthur C. Clarke’s ideal of manhood. While the author may have some ideas about race and gender that seem archaic over sixty years later, he was certainly progressive for his time.
The thing about Childhood’s End, though, is that it’s really not a character-driven book. It doesn’t even have a particularly strong plot. Very little actually happens, and if one were to consider the story Clarke tells in this book against the whole backdrop of time, his portrait of humanity is akin to taking a snapshot of a 90-year-old person just moments before they die. Childhood’s End is a book about ideas, and the characters and story are almost incidental to the big things that Clarke wanted to think about in 1953.
In Childhood’s End, Clarke imagines a utopia, then the dystopia inside it. He dreams up a perfect world, then he picks it apart, and then he tells us that none of it matters anyway. I can’t tell if Childhood’s End is profoundly optimistic about humanity or if it’s deeply pessimistic, but it’s definitely given me some things to think about.
One thing I will say unequivocally, though, is that SyFy is definitely going to screw up the adaptation of it. Which is sad, because Charles Dance will be a perfect Karellan and I hate to see him wasted on whatever the nonsense is that SyFy is going to air with the same title as this lovely book.
So, because I’ve read the book, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on everything that happens in this last episode of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but I think that people who haven’t read the book might feel a little let down by it. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that they didn’t dumb things down for the television audience, and I was very excited that the book’s ending was translated almost exactly for the show. On the other hand, I feel like there was a good deal of nuance and many shades of meaning lost in that translation, and I found myself filling in some blanks with information from the novel.
Sir Walter’s resignation.
“Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” begins in Parliament, where Sir Walter is resigning amid a flurry of reports of new magic being performed all over England. It’s clear that something is happening, and it’s clear that Sir Walter is being blamed for it. The word “revolution” is even used, which is exactly the sort of thing the government would have liked to avoid. After walking out of Parliament, Sir Walter heads to Starecross to visit with his wife. Meanwhile, Mr. Norrell has returned to Hurtfew Abbey, and Jonathan Strange has departed from Venice.
Drawlight and Lascelles.
Drawlight has also left Venice and has returned to England with Jonathan Strange’s messages. However, he is waylaid and murdered by Lascelles. I’m not really sure exactly how this could have been done better on the show, but I didn’t like it. Lascelles here seems almost cartoonishly evil, and I don’t think the show did as good a job as Susanna Clarke did in the book of showing the escalation of Lascelles’s violent behavior and rhetoric, so his decision to murder Drawlight here feels somewhat out of character. Basically, Lascelles in the show has been an asshole, but not a particularly murderous one before now. I was also disappointed that Drawlight wasn’t absorbed into the earth like he was in the book. It was such a beautifully gruesome scene the way Clarke wrote it, and wonderfully symbolic with the land, full of reawakened magic, swallowing Drawlight up entirely.
Lascelles and Childermass.
When Lascelles makes it to Hurtfew, things between he and Childermass rather quickly come to a head. While reading his cards, Childermass discovers Lascelles’ murder of Drawlight and misappropriation of Jonathan Strange’s messages. Childermass’s accusation of thievery prompts Lascelles to attack him. While Lascelles does slice Childermass’s cheek, Childermass is able to retrieve the box with Lady Pole’s finger in it. This, he questions Norrell about, but when Childermass asks Norrell’s leave to take the finger back to Lady Pole, Norrell refuses. Finally, Childermass leaves his master, saying goodbye with the sad statement, “You have made the wrong choice, sir, as usual.”
Childermass finally goes.
This is another scene that is changed from the book only slightly, but I think it’s significant. There, the conflict between Lascelles and Childermass occurs similarly, but it ends not with Childermass asking to leave on a mission. In the book, Norrell is forced to choose between Childermass, his servant for some eighteen years, and Lascelles, a recent friend but one who is closer to Norrell in wealth and social status. In the show, Childermass is quitting rather than being sent away, and it matters. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is an exploration of differences, between genders, races, and social classes, and this scene ought to be the climax of the class drama that has been playing out over the previous six episodes. Instead of having Norrell choosing–the worthy Childermass or the wicked Lascelles–the real choice is Childermass’s–to obey Norrell or to finally go his own way–and it doesn’t matter that Childermass says it’s Norrell’s choice.
Norrell must face Jonathan Strange alone. With a candlestick, apparently.
A scene that ought to be an indictment of Norrell’s class consciousness and stubborn elitism instead ends up making Norrell seem fairly sympathetic–after all, he’s been duped by Lascelles and now Childermass is abandoning him when Norrell is most in need of a wise companion. It feels to me as if this scene is trying to have things both ways–we’re intended to cheer for Childermass’s emancipation, but we’re also supposed to feel bad for Mr. Norrell. It’s as if the show wants us to believe that Norrell is somehow just a victim of circumstance in this situation, even though that is demonstrably not the case.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in the library at Hurtfew.
With Childermass off on his way to Starecross and Lascelles lost in the labyrinth, Mr. Norrell is left alone to face Jonathan Strange, who has finally arrived. While Norrell has been preparing (sort of) for a fight, it turns out that Strange hasn’t come for revenge at all; he wants Mr. Norrell’s help, to defeat the Gentleman and free Arabella. Their reunion is everything I could ever have wanted, to be honest. It’s sweet and funny and awkward, and while it’s not exactly as it was in the book (in particular, there’s a sort of weird bit of magic that Jonathan Strange does that I didn’t really care for) it captures the spirit of it very well.
Lady Pole sleeps at Starecross.
By the time Childermass arrives at Starecross, Sir Walter is there and has already been informed by Segundus that Lady Pole is not mad but enchanted. What these men don’t know (because they apparently didn’t bother to really read Jonathan Strange’s letter to her) is that Lady Pole is busy staying at Lost-Hope on purpose in order to watch over Arabella and guide her out of faerie when the time comes.
Sir Walter did manage to catch the part of the letter where it’s mentioned that Stephen Black has been serving the Gentleman, although not the part where Stephen Black was also enchanted against his will. So instead of recognizing Stephen Black’s enchantment, four white dudes lock him into a cell in an asylum. This would be easier to watch if the show was better at dealing with Stephen Black as a character, but it’s not. You would think that possibly Childermass, who is normally so insightful, might speak up for a fellow servant, but he doesn’t (although he’s perfectly willing later to pump Stephen for information). You might think that Segundus and Honeyfoot might recognize Stephen’s affliction as being the same as Lady Pole’s when Stephen is similarly unable to speak of it, but they don’t. You might even think that Sir Walter, who has known Stephen his whole life, might just not be such a dick, but no such luck. It’s truly appalling.
However, what I find more appalling is how little time we really get to spend with Stephen Black in this episode and how little of that time is focused on Stephen Black himself. Just as the show bungles its handling of class dynamics, it also pulls its punches when it comes to dealing with Stephen Black’s experiences of racism as a black man in early 19th century England. We get to see the racism he experiences, but the show neglects to really explore how Stephen feels about it and how it affects his decisions and what it means for his relationship with the Gentleman. A perceptive viewer of the show who is familiar with the book might be able to make something out of what we’re shown, but the examination of racism that characterizes Stephen Black’s narrative is still garbled at best.
Mr. Norrell has saved one copy of Jonathan Strange’s book.
Back at Hurtfew, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are trying to figure out how best to summon the Raven King. The trouble is that none of the names anyone ever called him were really his own. The Raven King is a title, and John Uskglass is just the name of some Norman nobleman who might have been his father. The idea occurs to them that they could just use the abbey–built by the Raven King, after all–to find him, and all they have to do now is figure out what summoning spell to use. This is when Mr. Norrell brings out his copy (the last copy!) of Jonathan Strange’s book, and it’s wonderful because this is it. This is the moment when it’s obvious that these guys are meant to be together forever. Because they need each other and they understand each other and they are stronger together than apart.
Lady Pole disappears from Lost-Hope mid-dance.
At Starecross, Segundus has succeeded in rejoining Lady Pole and her finger, and she wakes up spitting mad. Sir Walter seems oblivious to the fact that when his wife says that she “was bargained away for a wicked man’s career” she’s talking about him at least as much as she’s talking about Mr. Norrell. Meanwhile, Childermass goes searching for Vinculus after speaking to Stephen Black. Poor Stephen, of course, is still stuck in his prison when the Gentleman shows up in a rage over his loss of Lady Pole.
John Uskglass, The Raven King.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell succeed in summoning the Raven King, but they are quickly disappointed as he immediately leaves the room. He hasn’t come to help them at all; he’s got to go resurrect and rewrite Vinculus instead. While I have been generally pleased with the casting for this adaptation, I actually hate the way they portrayed the Raven King. All that long, stringy looking hair? Ugh. I suppose it could be worse, but this isn’t at all how I imagined him. I did like how they shot the resurrection of Vinculus, even though Paul Kaye hammed it up perhaps a tad too much.
The Gentleman’s face when Lady Pole confronts him.
At Starecross, the Gentleman has arrived and freed Stephen Black from his cell when he is confronted by Lady Pole. This is perhaps my favorite scene in the whole show. Lady Pole is amazing, and it’s incredibly gratifying to see her finally get to use her words after spending so long being unable to speak her mind. It doesn’t hurt that the Gentleman’s reaction is so great. Marc Warren really makes the best faces.
Sacrificing Norrell’s books is not a popular idea.
Things get even better when Stephen Black gets summoned to Hurtfew by the magicians, who are trying to get the Raven King to come back and kill the fairy. They sacrifice Norrell’s library in order to put all of English magic at the disposal of “the nameless slave,” who is, currently anyway, Stephen. This would be all well and good if Lascelles didn’t choose just this moment to escape from the labyrinth and shoot Stephen in the black–just in time for the Gentleman to show up and see what has happened to his favorite. The distraught Gentleman turns Lascelles into ceramic (or something) and shatters him, then returns to Lost-Hope with Stephen’s body.
Another great Marc Warren face.
Lascelles’ fate is perhaps the one that is most obviously changed from what happened to him in the book, and it’s pretty disappointing. It’s not that it isn’t nice to see Lascelles sort of get what’s coming to him, but this end, at the hands of the Gentleman, just doesn’t have the same kind of more poetic justice as what happens in the novel. That said, doing the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart would probably have added several more minutes to an already packed episode, and not everyone would love it as much as I would. That said, I also felt like Lascelles’ shooting Stephen Black felt gratuitous, a somewhat cheap way to add another tiny bit of drama and, I guess, to give Lascelles something to do so he could be brought back on screen just long enough to die.
Mr. Norrell’s first journey to Faerie.
The final climax of the episode takes place at Lost-Hope, where the Gentleman has retreated to mourn Stephen Black. Following Lascelles’ death, Strange and Norrell waste no time in pursuing the Gentleman, which gives us one last brief journey through Faerie. Norrell is at his most likable when he is doing magic, and I enjoyed how much he enjoyed finally seeing Faerie for himself.
Jonathan Strange and Arabella Strange reunited.
When the magicians finally get to Lost-Hope they split up, with Norrell going to find Stephen Black and Jonathan Strange looking for Arabella. In a sort of cheesy moment that is only necessitated by the rather silly decision to have Arabella brainwashed on the show, Jonathan Strange is able to get Arabella her memories back by kissing her. I still think these two are adorable together, but this was a bit too much. Right before things get really dangerous, Jonathan pushes Arabella through a mirror that takes her to the Greysteels in Venice.
Stephen Black and the Gentleman together for the last time.
What happens next is much more interesting, anyway. The Gentleman is surprised when Stephen seemingly rises from the dead full of magic. I do think Stephen’s moment of triumph here is a little tainted by the general mishandling of his character, but there’s still something very gratifying about seeing a character who has been so disempowered for so long finally having the power to change his situation. I did find myself feeling a little bad for the Gentleman in the end, but the biggest feeling I had about this sequence was that I wish we got to see something–anything–of what Lost-Hope will look like under Stephen Black’s administration.
OTP forever.
After the Gentleman’s death, Strange and Norrell find themselves back at Hurtfew Abbey where they learn that the fairy’s death hasn’t broken the curse on Jonathan Strange after all. What’s more, it seems that he and Norrell are trapped together now. This might not be for very long, since Jonathan Strange is dying, but Norrell won’t leave his friend either way. Norrell holds Strange in his arms as the black tower sucks up the two magicians and Hurtfew Abbey itself. On a nearby vantage point, Childermass and Vinculus are watching, and Vinculus informs Childermass that Strange and Norrell were only a spell the Raven King has been casting this whole time.
The black tower disappears, taking Hurtfew Abbey with it.
The rest of the episode revisits the rest of the characters before returning at last to York, where the story began. Lady Pole is leaving her husband to join Arabella on the continent, which is awesome and makes me want another show that is just all about the adventures of Lady Pole, Arabella Strange, and Flora Greysteel. I might feel bad for Sir Walter, who seems a bit sad and taken aback by his wife’s decision, but Sir Walter is awful and I think leaving him is the best thing Lady Pole could do for herself. Her speech about not wanting to trade one kind of bondage for another is a little heavy-handed, but it could have been worse probably.
Arabella and Flora in Venice.
Speaking of Arabella and Flora, they are becoming good friends. Flora has brought Arabella to the place where Jonathan Strange once lived in Venice, and Arabella gets to have one last conversation with her husband there. The circumstances are somewhat different, but the conversation is much the same as the one they had at the end of the book where Jonathan tells her to be happy and not mourn too much for him. I was surprised that I didn’t find this scene particularly affecting (I really thought I would be sadder, to be honest), but I was glad that they retained the ambiguity of the book’s ending. I was half worried that the show would try to shoehorn in a happier ending for Jonathan and Arabella. Interestingly, though, this isn’t where the show ends at all.
Ending at the beginning. York.
The show ends, not with Jonathan and Arabella or even Strange and Norrell, but where it began, with the York Society of Magicians. Following the disappearance of Strange and Norrell, Childermass has gathered the group once more to tell them that their agreement with his master is null and void. They are all free to study and practice as much magic as they like. When they point out that they have no books now that Norrell and his library are gone, Childermass brings forward Vinculus, who is still the Book of the Raven King and newly rewritten. They will learn to read it together.
For all that this episode did a good job of collapsing its storylines and focusing the action into just a couple of places, it at times felt frantically rushed, and the final “where are they now?” montage seemed almost tacked on. Certain things seemed glossed over and unclear, although I suppose that, technically, all the ends of the story are tied up. But I would have liked to see just a bit more of everyone, especially Lady Pole, who was recreated so brilliantly in the show by Alice Englert, and Stephen Black, whose fate seems rather uncertain in the show, what with Lost-Hope crumbling and all.
Ultimately, for me, this show has turned out to be just slightly unsatisfying, which is almost worse than if it had just been terrible. There are a lot of things in this adaptation that I would have dont just a little differently, but nothing that I passionately feel needs to have been changed. That said, I’ve now watched it all the way through twice, and I liked it much better the second time. I think this will be a show that I watch over and over again and enjoy differently on each viewing, which is perhaps the best thing I could say about any miniseries.
Childermass announcing the beginning of a new age of English magic.
I would have liked “A Glitch in the System” if it were a 90-minute sci-fi thriller, but as an episode of this show it just didn’t work for me. Because I have a hard time just abandoning shows in the middle of a season, I will be continuing to watch, but I’m beginning to despair of the show ever finding its footing.
In this episode, we learned some things:
D’avin is still having PTSD nightmares, but he’s going to Pawter for some kind of treatment.
Apparently Killjoys also sometimes loot wrecked ships, I guess.
D’avin and Johnny have some inside family joke about space rats that no one thinks is funny. Because it’s not funny.
This wrecked ship is clearly a terrible place. Yep. Turns out it’s a torture ship, because that is a thing in this universe, although it largely goes unexamined and uncriticized in spite of the use of politicized terminology like “enhanced interrogation.” It feels more like dystopian window dressing than any sort of serious political or social commentary.
The thing that D’avin did that is causing him so much mysterious manpain is murdering his whole squad, except he doesn’t remember anything about it other than that he did it. No one seems particularly surprised or concerned by this, although they do feel bad for D’avin because he’s clearly torn up over it.
Dutch is a badass, and she jumps out into space with no suit on.
Lucy is an asshole, and she likes Johnny best. Personally, I like jerk AIs although this is, admittedly, a silly trope.
D’avin has some kind of memory dampeners implanted in his brain, which I guess explains his memory loss.
Khlyen really wants Dutch to do murder for him, but I still don’t understand why it’s so important that it has to be her, what with her being so reluctant about it. This plot is moving along at an almost negative pace.
This episode is very sadly devoid of the costume porn we saw in previous episodes. There’s not even a single pretty dress in it.
Here’s the thing about this show. It needs to pick a thing and stick with it. Early on, Killjoys was compared heavily to Firefly, but the major strength of Firefly was that it was essentially about just one thing: how the ragtag group of libertarians kept their ship running and avoided government interference in their professional crime. Sure, Firefly had a couple of background plots like with the Tams (although they were also just trying to avoid the government) and whatever was going on with Inara (who even knows?), but it was all very thematically consistent.
Killjoys is all over the place thematically; although it has some interesting ideas, it just never quite manages to be coherent. It could be that the season is building towards some kind of major resolution in the final couple episodes or something, but if I wasn’t so neurotically committed to seeing things through it would have already lost me as a viewer. Judging from the general lack of buzz and mediocre reception of the show I’ve seen elsewhere, whatever the show’s strategy is doesn’t seem to be working out so great for them.
Empire Ascendant is definitely one of my top ten most anticipated books this year, so I’ve been waiting pretty anxiously to see what it will look like.
I’m not disappointed. This cover is gorgeous, and I can’t wait to have it on the shelf next to The Mirror Empire.
Spindle is a charming little self-published title by Tasmanian author W.R. Gingell. I received a copy of it through NetGalley, where I was drawn in by the book description and a surprisingly nice-looking (for self-publishing) cover image. It turns out that Spindle is a fast, fun read, well worth $2.99 for the Kindle version.
It’s a Sleeping Beauty story that begins with our heroine, Poly (short for Polyhymnia), being kissed awake by an enchanter named Luck, who managed to find a loophole in the curse. The rest of the book details their adventures as they work together to find a way to break the curse once and for all and defeat the evil wizard who created it.
Spindle definitely has some problems, most of which I think would have been solved by being put through a professional editorial process. There are a lot of adverbs as dialogue tags, which I find to be generally either distracting or redundant. There are a handful (but literally only a handful) of typos that might have been caught with just another once-over by someone detail-oriented. There is a lot of reusing of phrases and words that I can tell the author really likes, and I have some issues with a lot of word choices. The language often verges on pretentious and the book overall ends up being almost (but not quite) too preciously quirky.
All that said, I enjoyed Spindle a great deal, mostly because Gingell has come up with a great cast of characters, whose interactions with each other are interesting and compelling. I appreciated that Poly’s ending up with Luck wasn’t entirely a foregone conclusion from the first page, and I liked that she got to explore a couple of other romantic attractions with men who respected her. Poly’s adoption of Onepiece and her growth in her role as a parent to him is nice and gives Poly something to do and focus on besides dealing with her curse and sorting out her feelings about Luck. There are a good number of other female characters that Poly befriends, and I’m always happy to read about women having relationships that aren’t toxic. I particularly liked Poly’s friendship with Margaret.
Of course, probably the most important relationship Poly has is with Luck, the enchanter who woke her up. I’m not sure how I feel about this one, to be honest, because Luck is often a terribly annoying character. I didn’t care at all for the repeated descriptions of Luck as vague. It made him seem both boring–with just the one character trait–and it created a consistently comical image in my head of a dude just staring off into space all the time. It’s a poor word choice, in my opinion, and not one to inspire romantic feelings. As far as what we’re shown about Luck (as opposed to told), he’s often self-centered, distractable, uncommunicative, needlessly obscure, and awfully inconsiderate of nearly everyone around him. It seems like the relationship between Poly and Luck is supposed to be evolving over time, but mostly I felt like Poly just learned better coping mechanisms and became more self-sufficient. This is nice, but I found myself wondering why they needed to end up together at all.
In the end, the mad-cap high energy of Spindle manages to be more fun than annoying, and I’d recommend it as a piece of light reading that is a little reminiscent of Howl’s Moving Castle (the Studio Ghibli movie, not the book). I’m not dying to read any of W.R. Gingell’s older work, but I might keep an eye out for things she publishes in the future, especially if she gets picked up by a proper publisher who could help iron out some of the wrinkles in Gingell’s style.
Shadowshaper seems to be most often compared to Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments, but it’s a terrible comparison. In fact, there is no comparison to be made that isn’t entirely superficial. Shadowshaper isn’t a flawless piece of work, but it’s not a mess of derivative, hackneyed tropes like the Mortal Instruments series was, either.
Yes, Shadowshaper also takes place in New York, but where Clare’s series was generic and poorly researched, Older’s book is set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood that he resides in himself and has a strong sense of place that helps to draw the reader into the world he’s created.
Yes, Shadowshaper also has a teenage girl protagonist whose story starts when she begins seeing weird stuff and finds out she has magical powers, but where Clare’s Clary Fray is a bland cipher upon which the reader can self-project fairly freely, Older’s Sierra Santiago has a vibrant personality and a specific identity that invites the reader to share and understand her but not to become her. While Sierra has plenty of likable traits–she’s clever and brave and kind, for example–there are many things about her that I don’t expect will be universally relatable. As a white reader, I appreciate the gift that Older offers me–a tiny window into an experience of the world very different from my own–and I can only imagine how gratifying it must be for young people who share more of Sierra’s experiences to discover this book in libraries and bookstores that are far too full of characters like Clary Fray.
Yes, like Clary Fray, Sierra has a group of friends who help her fight the forces of darkness, but where Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters are a group thrown together by the most boring sort of destiny ever (and often don’t even seem to like each other), Sierra’s friend group in Shadowshaper is made up of people who are part of a community, and that community is really the whole point of the book. It feels real and organic, and the emotional payoffs, for the most part, feel earned.
Shadowshaper even has romance, but it doesn’t take over the novel, and it develops sensibly; at the end of the book, I felt like Sierra and Robbie were embarking on an exciting new part of their lives, but not as if everything was settled before the characters even graduated high school. I always appreciate when authors do YA romance without turning it into some sort of star-crossed, destined, One True Love situation. Young love deserves to be treated seriously, and teenagers’ emotions are deep and strong, but we seldom meet The One at that age. I tend to enjoy YA romance much more when authors keep it in perspective, and Older has done a nice job with it here, creating a heroine who likes a boy but doesn’t waste too much time overthinking the situation. Sierra has more important things to deal with, after all.
I would have liked this book to spend more time with Sierra’s mother, who I think is interesting enough to carry a book of her own. I felt like Maria’s change of heart about shadowshaping at the end of the book felt abrupt and more driven by what the author wanted to happen and how he wanted to end things than it was by anything that would normally have naturally happened with these characters. I understand wanting to write the happiest possible ending, but the way that this happens felt pretty inexplicable to me.
The shadowshaping magic itself was on the one hand really interesting, but on the other hand slightly nonsensical. It’s not exactly clear what this magic is capable of, and some of the descriptions of the magic Sierra works are confusing. One of the reasons I read this book in the first place was that it promised Caribbean magic. While I think it does a good job of capturing the sense that shadowshaping is specific to the culture depicted in the book, it’s on a bit more shaky ground when compared to other fantasy magic systems (but still worlds better than anything Cassandra Clare has written).
Shadowshaper is an excellent read overall, though. It’s fast-paced, and I had a hard time putting it down because I always wanted to know what happened next. While its flaws aren’t inconsiderable, I think they are more than made up for by its strengths–namely, it’s beautifully crafted setting and a delightfully plucky heroine. Also, it’s got an absolutely gorgeous cover.
“The Black Tower” might be the single best episode of television I’ve watched so far in 2015. It’s superbly written on its own, and it shines as an adaptation of a much-beloved novel. What (remarkably little, actually) is lost in the translation from page to screen is more than made up for by the incredible performances of Bertie Carvel (Jonathan Strange), Marc Warren (The Gentleman), and Ariyon Bakare (Stephen Black). This is definitely the best episode yet for all of these characters.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity?
We begin the episode with breaking of two bits of Jonathan Strange news: his escape from jail and the publication of his book, The History and Practice of English Magic. The publisher is delighted, although he does point out that the one problem with having a fugitive author is that he doesn’t know where to send all the money they are raking in from the book sales.
At his house in Hanover Square, Mr. Norrell opens his copy of Strange’s book, which is beautiful (a nice detail kept from the novel, where Strange insisted that part of his goal with the book was for it to be a work of art). The shot of Norrell weeping as he reads it is, I think, the most human and sympathetic we’ve seen him since his final tea with Strange, and it’s definitely the best we see of him in this episode.
Mr. Norrell casting his spell to destroy Jonathan Strange’s book.
It’s clear that Norrell has mixed feelings about the book, but he truly believes it to be dangerous enough that he puts down his copy at least long enough to magick all the other copies of it out of existence. The way they show this spell is kind of uncharacteristically (for this show, anyway) silly, as the books just start disappearing–each with an audible pop–but it’s a welcome bit of levity in an otherwise very dark episode. And, honestly, I suppose that for many bibliophiles, this tiny bit of comedy isn’t going to distract from what an enormous crime it is for anyone to censor any book as completely as Norrell does Strange’s.
Jonathan Strange in Venice.
In Venice, and completely unaware of Norrell’s destruction of the book, Jonathan Strange is hard at work trying to summon a fairy, and he’s looking much the worse for wear. He’s also, frustratingly, consistently successful at summoning the Gentleman. He just can’t see him. My favorite thing about these first scenes of Strange is how perfectly realized his Venice workshop is. It looks like exactly the sort of place that a wealthy and slightly mad and extremely single-minded fugitive magician on a mission might be hanging out. My only criticism is that it looks like he’s been there for years rather than for only a couple of months, and so it becomes another sort of example of the show’s struggles with conveying the passage of time.
Jonathan Strange has lunch with the Greysteels.
I was super excited to see that they managed to squeeze in the Greysteels, and it turns out that Flora is at least as delightful in the show as she ever was in the book. Jonathan Strange’s first meeting with Flora and her father is excellently done, if a little rushed. They managed to get Clive Mantle to play Dr. Greysteel, and literally every look on his face is my favorite. He is so fed up with Flora’s shenanigans, but she’s clearly a force of nature he can’t control even a little bit. The Greysteels have been visiting with Mrs. Delgado, the crazy cat lady from the book, and have I mentioned how happy I am that they didn’t cut Venice and the Greysteels from the show?
“All you men leave me in peace.”
At Starecross, Vinculus is trying to convince Stephen Black to let him out of his cell, and Lady Pole is just fucking done. She’s exhausted with trying to communicate with people about her situation, and she’s disheartened (though not particularly surprised) to learn that Jonathan Strange has fled the country. It seems that she has finally given up on their ability to be of any help to her at all, and she intends to sleep so that she may keep watch over Arabella at Lost-Hope.
Well, this is embarrassing.
In Parliament, we get to see a great shouting match, as Sir Walter Pole and Lord Liverpool have become pretty unpopular these days. Basically everyone is pissed off about the magicians, and they blame Sir Walter particularly for promoting them.
At Hanover Square, Mr. Norrell is desperate to learn what Jonathan Strange is doing, and this precipitates a trip to the prison to ask Drawlight about it. Poor Drawlight is looking even more poorly than Jonathan Strange these days, but he’s still managed to glean some gossip about the magician and his doings in Venice. To learn more, Norrell sends Drawlight to Venice to spy on Strange in person. While this is basically what happened in the book, I felt like it was out of character for Norrell to threaten Drawlight in person the way he did here. In the book, it’s Lascelles who retrieves Drawlight and sends him on his way alone, because Norrell doesn’t get his hands dirty with that sort of thing. I suppose I understand why it might be easier to film it the way they did in the show, especially in an episode where Norrell has relatively little screentime when compared to Jonathan Strange, but still. It’s a small departure that actually makes a fairly big difference in the way we understand Norrell’s character during this part of the story, and I don’t care for it.
Mrs. Delgado.
Returning to Venice, Jonathan Strange has decided to pay his own visit to Mrs. Delgado. He offers to give her her heart’s desire if she will teach him to be mad. The deal is quickly struck; Mrs. Delgado is turned into a cat, and Jonathan Strange has concentrated all of the old widow’s madness into one dead mouse. He tries to eat the mouse whole, but finds that Mrs. Delgado’s madness was even stronger than he expected it to be, so he returns to his laboratory to try using it a different way.
Marc Warren gives great face as the Gentleman in this episode.
After steeping the dead mouse in some water (and I’m not sure if this is more or less disgusting than the way he ground up the dried mouse and mixed it with water in the book), Jonathan Strange drinks a few drops of the mouse liquid and continues on with trying to summon a fairy. Sure enough, Jonathan finds himself able to see the Gentleman on his very next summoning attempt, for all that he is nearly too mad to realize at first what he’s done.
For his part, the Gentleman is just absolutely furious, although quietly so, and as soon as Strange releases him from the summoning he goes to complain to Stephen Black about it. Still at Starecross, Stephen Black decides after this visit from the Gentleman to listen to Vinculus, who promises that he knows how to free Stephen from the fairy. When Stephen leaves Starecross, he has Vinculus hidden in the back of his cart.
Back in Venice again, Drawlight has arrived and is rather conspicuously lurking about in the background as Flora Greysteel helps Jonathan Strange shop for a dress for his wife. Clearly in high spirits following his first successful contact with a fairy, Jonathan is practically effervescent as he fills Flora in on his plans to revive Arabella and restore magic to England. Flora asks if he will teach her, and Strange affirms that he will teach “all the women and the poor men,” and this affirmation is an important piece of the characterization of Jonathan Strange as having a much more egalitarian philosophy than the very class-conscious and chauvinistic Mr. Norrell.
The second meeting.
Jonathan Strange’s second meeting with the Gentleman doesn’t go nearly so well as he’d hoped. Strange is prepared to negotiate for Arabella’s resurrection, but the Gentleman’s reply is a flat no. He cannot resurrect Arabella because of “certain circumstances”–obviously, to the viewer, the fact that Arabella is not, in fact, dead at all. Unfortunately, Jonathan Strange knows nothing of this, and his pain is palpable. However, this leads Strange to question the Gentleman about his previous interactions with English magicians, and this is how Jonathan Strange discovers the secret of how Mr. Norrell resurrected Lady Pole.
Lady Pole at Lost-Hope, disappointed again.
Denied his wife, Strange demands that the fairy bring him a token from his last dealing with an English magician, and he receives Lady Pole’s finger in a box. Using the finger, Strange is able to travel through a mirror to reach Lost-Hope, where he finds himself at one of the Gentleman’s balls. Strange is greeted first by Stephen Black, who is aghast at the magician’s appearance there. Then he is met by Lady Pole who at first, hopefully, asks if Strange has come to rescue them, but quickly becomes deflated when she realizes that he had no idea that she or Stephen or Arabella were even there.
Jonathan Strange faces the Gentleman alone.
When Jonathan sees Arabella, he becomes distraught and yells for the Gentleman to release her, but the fairy instead dispels all of the revelers except Stephen Black. All of the fairy Gentleman’s anger at the magicians is released in one terrific spell. Though it drains much of his strength to do it, the Gentleman curses Jonathan Strange with eternal darkness and deports the magician from Lost-Hope.
Before we see what happens to Jonathan Strange, Stephen Black wakes up back in the English countryside, where he is still traveling with Vinculus. As they prepare to continue on their journey, Stephen confronts Vinculus about the prophecy and demands to see the book that Vinculus claims to have, at which point Vinculus strips off his shirt to show that he is the Book of the Raven King.
Stephen Black and Vinculus.
“Our meaning is written in our skin,” Vinculus intones, to which Stephen Black says that his skin means that he will always face racism and oppression. Vinculus replies that his skin says the opposite, and that Stephen Black “will be raised on high” and become a king. It’s a powerful scene, and Ariyon Bakare’s performance is note perfect. The show has often struggled with doing justice to the character of Stephen Black, but I think they really nailed it here. It also helps that in this episode they finally shot some Stephen Black scenes outside of poorly lit English houses so we can see a bit more of Ariyon Bakare’s face, which is highly expressive when not in shadows.
Flora Greysteel enters the darkness.
In Venice, an enormous, swirling tower of darkness has appeared over the city. While most of the city’s denizens are fleeing, Flora Greysteel runs towards it–because of course she’s the sort of woman who runs to the danger instead of away from it. She finds Jonathan, who tries to send her away, but Flora is desperate to help her friend. Strange tells her that she will know what to do when the time comes for her to help him, but she is only persuaded to go when her father comes to escort her to safety. They pass Drawlight on their way out, and when they get back to their own apartments, there is a mirror waiting there under a blanket.
The Black Tower.
Unable to learn anything from the Greysteels, Drawlight tries to leave town, but finds himself being chased by the tower of darkness, which is calling his name. The poor man finds himself pulled to the center of the darkness, where he comes upon Jonathan Strange, who promises not to harm him if Drawlight will take three messages to England. First, the box with Lady Pole’s finger and the explanation for it must be given to Childermass. Second, there is a letter for Lady Pole herself. And the third message, as it was in the book, is for Mr. Norrell and is simply, “I am coming.”
Once more at Hanover Square, Mr. Norrell is preparing to leave for his home and library at Hurtfew Abbey when Sir Walter and the Lord Liverpool arrive with a final commission from the government: stop Jonathan Strange. Mr. Norrell upbraids the Ministers for encouraging Strange in the first place, and then says that he doesn’t even know if he can stop Jonathan Strange or even what Strange is capable of doing.
Childermass notices the mirrors first.
While Mr. Norrell’s household is finishing packing up his belongings, Childermass notices strange sounds coming from the mirrors in the house–like faint scratching or the pecking of birds. After the Ministers have left, Norrell is examining a large mirror more closely, when it smashes open and a flood of ravens bursts out of it, which is terribly dramatic and a striking visual effect.
The episode ends with Vinculus’s meeting with the tree. As soon as they arrive at the out of the way place–a sort of canyon, with just one tree in the center of it–Stephen Black points out that this is not a friendly looking place, but the camp out to wait anyway.
Vinculus and the Gentleman.
Soon enough, the Gentleman arrives, visiting Stephen for the first time since he cursed Jonathan Strange and still in a peculiar mood. When he realizes that Vinculus can see him, the Gentleman seems to turn his residual malice on this new target, suggesting that they kill Vinculus and then go do something else. Vinculus informs the fairy that he will find that Vinculus is “a hard man to kill,” but, while Stephen Black weeps helplessly, the Gentleman hangs Vinculus anyway. Keeping with the tarot card symbolism that was so common in the book, “The Black Tower” has as its final image a hanged man in a tree rather ominously covered with ravens.
The Mary Sue recommends Star vs. the Forces of Evil, which looks pretty freakin’ adorable. If I don’t watch it, I’ll definitely suggest it to my daughter if I can tear her away from her current FairyTail obsession.
In spite of its awful title–I actually find it, like, deeply and viscerally disgusting–“Vessel” was an episode good enough to keep me watching this show for at least one more week.
There are some tropes on display in this episode that are usually pretty annoying, but that I think are mostly well-executed here. I do tend to have a soft spot for badass pregnant women in fiction, though, and so I’m willing to forgive quite a lot just because I love the characters of Constance and Jenny.
I actually like Constance and Jenny so much that I’m not even going to write much about the rest of the episode. Dutch is still mysterious, and she’s mysteriously in possession of some fancy musical instrument that usually only belongs to royalty. The newly introduced Delle Seyah Kendry is fascinating, and I kind of liked the dynamic between her and Dutch, although I thought things were wrapped up a little too neatly at the end. I kind of liked that D’avin was so good with the girls, although I also sort of hated that his basic human decency (learning their names! gasp!) is played for laughs.
The surrogates.
Back to Jenny and Constance, though.
If the show really feels like they must write an episode dealing with young women who are in a sort of fertility cult where they are surrogates for wealthy people, I generally approve of the way it was done in this episode. These aren’t poor, sad, ignorant girls. They are interesting young women who are trying to make the best of what life has handed them.
Jenny saving the day.
Jenny, it turns out, is something of an engineer, but when her family couldn’t afford to keep her she got sent to be a surrogate. However, this doesn’t stop her from continuing to develop and use her skills. Unfortunately, Jenny dies in the episode when she kind of inexplicably decides to suicide bomb the men who are trying to capture Constance. It’s an effective tactic, though, and Jenny’s sacrifice clears the way for the remaining girls to escape.
Sadly, I don’t think Jenny’s death is treated with a truly appropriate amount of gravity–the team just keeps on with barely a pause to think about what just happened. Obviously this sort of “job of the week” show is going to have some kind of disposable single-episode characters, but I’d prefer if Jenny wasn’t so disposable, especially when I’m still not sure why she didn’t just throw the grenade instead of walking it to the bad guys herself. This makes her character seem not just disposable, but senselessly disposable in an effort to elicit a cheap emotional response from the audience that isn’t backed up by the other characters in the show.
Constance, however, is a consistently great character, in my opinion, and I think this is shown best in her interactions with Dutch, who seems at first to think that all the surrogates are sad, brainwashed waifs who need a Strong Female Character to rescue them. Dutch is quickly disabused of this notion, however. Constance actually has a pretty realistic view of her situation, she’s not afraid to advocate and make choices for herself, and she clearly knows her way around a gun.
Constance and Dutch.
I loved the conversation when Constance is going into labor and Dutch stops to ask what Constance wants. Dutch has so far bit a bit of a cipher, and she’s only being very slowly rounded out as a character, so it was nice to see her have a sort of human moment here. It also makes me happy to see women supporting women–especially women like Dutch, who is (so far, anyway) so much a totally stock version of the badass fighter type of Strong Female Character.
Constance is a character with a different sort of strength, and I enjoyed seeing Dutch increasingly come to accept that over the course of the episode. By the end, when Constance refuses the opportunity to help raise the child she bore in favor of dedicating her life to helping other young women like herself, Dutch seems to have come to truly respect her and again supports Constance’s choice.
Dutch and Delle Seyah. Dutch Seyah? I could go down with this ship.
This unconditional support for and respect of women’s choices was a strong theme in this episode, although it felt a bit buried by the end underneath the sheer amount of exposition “Vessel” contained about the Killjoys universe and its politics. I definitely feel like I have a better grasp on the politics of the Quad after this, and I’m looking forward to more intrigue with Delle Seyah, but I would have liked to see a bit more character development at this point. “D’avin and John are nice to women” isn’t character development, and was, frankly, a bit undermined anyway when they were discussing Dutch’s bangability at the end of the episode.
I’m glad to see things moving along in the show, even slowly, and I’m not ready to quit watching yet, but I still think it’s uneven and inconsistent.
Confession time: I’ve not read very much classic science fiction. As a kid, I was always more into dragons and wizards than space ships and aliens, and as an adult I find I’m just not often interested in reading books that are older than I am. Still, Arthur C. Clarke is one of the greats, Childhood’s End is one of my partner’s favorite books, and it’s getting a miniseries on SyFy later this year, so I felt like it was time to read this one.
Spindle is a charming little self-published title by Tasmanian author 
Shadowshaper seems to be most often compared to Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments, but it’s a terrible comparison. In fact, there is no comparison to be made that isn’t entirely superficial. Shadowshaper isn’t a flawless piece of work, but it’s not a mess of derivative, hackneyed tropes like the Mortal Instruments series was, either.
SF Bluestocking 