Rivers of London, books 1-7
3.0 Stars
11-20-2024

A slower, more genteel, more English, urban fantasy. In this case the MC is a green police officer, who stumbles into the supernatural while on a case and is gradually inducted into more and more of the mysteries of English magic. These stories are odd? One of the minor themes of the stories is jazz, e.g. the MC's dad is an almost famous jazz muscian, and the second book is about a series of cases in and around the London jazz scene. And the books are a little like the jazz, they sort of noodle along, doot-dootling, taking their time, in no particular hurry to get anywhere. The momement to moment experience of reading them is nice, and they can develop a pleasant patter once they get going, but this slow and unhurried pacing means that the books are never really page turners or thrillers. In particular, when starting a new book, there's definitely a hump of a few hours that you have to get over before settling in to the new story. Usually with an audio book series I'll just listen to all the stories straight through, but with these, in between each book, I definitely needed a few hours of light comedy podcasts before being ready to hunker down and start the next Rivers of London book.

I think part of the issue with the pacing/urgency is that these books lean more on the British police-procedural aspect than they do on the urban-fantasy aspect. So there's (almost) never a case where it is the protagonists against Cthulu or where they are badly out-matched; rather the MCs can always draw on a police force that numbers in the tens of thousands, a dense grid of CCTV cameras, small armies of analysts, tactical teams, etc. etc. The MCs do occasionally face threats to their lives, but for the most part these threats can be defeated/routed/contained if the MCs can just get back to their literally thousands of comrades. Or to put it another way, the MCs (almost) always have a monopoly on violence, and they only need to worry about local and temporary disturbances to that monopoly. So MCs go out on most investigations armed with a baton, or maybe a taser if there's a particularly dire situation, while in the Dresden universe the characters will not walk to the bathroom with less than a .45 and a shotgun. In the Rivers of London series really the struggle is not to defeat a big bad, but rather to solve the case, and to figure out and resolve whatever is happening before more people are injured. There were some parts of these police procedurals that I liked; for one the stories take a thoroughly modern and rational approach to major crimes, with all relevant info being entered into a centralized database for the case, while dozens of investigators methodically and exhaustively trace through every branch and leaf of relevant inquiry. So everyone who might possibly be involved in the case gets interviewed, and everyone and everything they reveal gets interviewed/investigated, and so on in an endless produce/consume loop until the case is solved or there is no more information to process. It's very much a breadth-first, almost organic-AI type of investigation, rather than an investigation that follows the single thread of the whims of a solo genius detective. This leads to a lot of dead ends, and occasional partial successes, and is kind of boring? But it is at least intelligent and sensible, and I'm fine with boring, as again these books do have a nice patter once they get going. I could however see a solid 60% of the urban-fantasy audience just wandering off from these repeated dead-ends. Other notes on the subject of boredeom: the MC talks about real estate like some authors talk about weather or scenery or the sky, basically any new scene will involve a discussion of the area's architecture or the history of the real estate in the area. I feel like this is a very middle-age, middle-class area of concern, i.e. it's something that me and my Mom would talk about, and is perhaps not the most exciting thing that the author could be writing. I also need to mention the Fae; there are dozens of river Gods and Goddesses, the eponymous Rivers of London, and they do basically nothing for like ~5 books? Again, a very weird authorial decision to introduce a Fae court, spend countless pages hyping them up, and then have them basically be uninvolved in the plot except for in the most modest of ways. These characters gradually start to play a more active role in the books, but oh wow does it take a long time.

Ok, so after 2 paragraphs of complaining, let me mention some of the positives. The writing is good writing; it's never less than competent and intelligent, there's constant small bits of humor and progress and spectacle, there's long running, low-key character duets between the various members of the police, the British magicians, the moderately magical underground, small time criminals, and the more elevated varieties of Fae and river-deities. I enjoyed the magic system, with its description of magic as being something like a musical note, a series of N dimensional shapes or sounds in the mind that practicioners gradually learn to hear and then to recreate during their training. I liked the ill-definedness and openness of the magical world, and the slow accretion of different magical traditions that the MC is gradually exposed to. Basically no one has a full picture of the magic-elephant; and different groups each have their own slice or perspective in how they interact with magic. I liked that the MC's family were immigrants, and his Mom is a house cleaner, and he spent swathes of his childhood helping her out at her job, and so he's constantly gathering impressions/clues of crime scenes and people's lives by how well they have dusted/cleaned/maintained their domicile. I also liked the solid Londonness of the stories; I think I finally might be beginning to develop the faintest understanding of the various English accents and their implications. I liked the MC's moderate naivete and idealism, and I liked the general upbeat and positive nature of these stories. I liked the author's take on urban-goblins and their combination of low-key criminality, bone-deep shiftyness and absolute inability to give a straight answer, while also being sort of charming and likeable and ever so slightly helpful in a roguish and scuzzy way.