The Amulet of Samarkand

Notes:

Let it be said up front that the entire plot of this series rests on the idea of summoning so-called demons using pentacles and other conventional trappings of black magic. However, let it also be said that it is in no sense about witchcraft or magic (or Wicca or Magyk). Firstly, for all the devil-worship paraphernalia, the “demons” are classes of Djinni from an Other Place who are summoned and bound to our own world in this way. They are the literary successors of Scheherezade and the Arabian Nights, not of Dennis Wheatley or Celia Rees. Secondly, the whole business is presented with a healthy dash of humour. These aren’t impressionable young females being drawn into dark arts and questionable practices: these are bored government functionaries trying to get some work done with the minimum effort, helped and hindered by powerful slaves who gleefully take any opportunity to misinterpret their orders and to escape their masters’ binding.

The setting is nominally contemporary: this first book contains references to laptops, smoke alarms and the hundred years since Gladstone’s death. However a lot of work done by technology in ours is done by the Djinni in this parallel world, with the resulting impression of a low-tech early-twentieth-century milieu. This impression is strengthened by the class divide between the ruling magicians and the commoners, by the fact that the great empires of the world are still mostly European, and by the magicians’ practice of taking individual apprentices. This last has the result that ambitious and hard-working youngsters such as Nathaniel can rise in power and influence quite quickly.

The story and its readability turn on the characters of Nathaniel – smart, determined, more than a little arrogant, but still only twelve – and Bartimaeus – ancient, crafty, wittily self-confident, and more inclined than he lets on to trust Nathaniel. The narrative switches between Bartimaeus in the first person and Nathaniel in the third, so you hear all of the djinn’s cynical and world-weary asides (as footnotes) while you learn about Nathaniel and his world as he himself learns. The balance is about right, and Bartimaeus has just the right mixture of bored slave and ingenious operator with an unexpected streak of affection. The obvious point of comparison is young genius Artemis Fowl and his partnership with Police Fairy Holly Short but Artemis was never a very convincing twelve-year-old while Nathaniel is a little more real, his vulnerability more likely. At least in this, the first book of the series.

The mechanics of the Djinni and their magician masters will be easily understood: the magicians use pentacles and incantations to summon a Djinn from its own dimension. The Djinni range from minor Imps to hugely powerful Marids, each one correspondingly harder to summon and to control. Once in our world, a Djinn can take almost any form but must obey its master until released (or until that master dies). The magicians have a certain power to inflict pain on the Djinn under their command, while the Djinn will take any opportunity to misinterpret its instructions or to break out of its captivity if there is a single gap in the pentacle or a misplaced word in the incantation. Once that happens, the Djinn will usually kill the summoning magician and return to its own dimension. A very few Djinni fall in with their masters as trusted servants. Fewer still actually form a friendship with the magician who summoned them. It seems that Bartimaeus has done this in the past, with the child pharaoh Ptolemy, which accounts for the form he most commonly adopts and his tendency to trust and to protect Nathaniel. (Albeit while needling him by highlighting his inadequacies).

Sold by his parents as an apprentice magician, Nathaniel is very receptive to a couple of mother-substitutes: Mrs Underwood, wife of his magician master; and Miss Lutyens, his gentle art teacher. The former is indeed like a mother to him, welcoming, forgiving, understanding, and when he inadvertently causes her violent death, it genuinely affects him. This crisis, and Nathaniel’s reaction to it, make the book far more credible. (Insofar as a story about government-controlled djinni can be credible). He’s fragile and shocked, but ready to take action from mixed motives of guilt and revenge. He’s egged on by Bartimaeus who delights in pointing out to him how corrupt societies built by magicians are and always have been, which only makes Nathaniel more determined to do the noble thing.

If you squint really hard, you can make out that Nathaniel ultimately profits from his wrongdoing. The amulet which he stole is indirectly the cause of the Underwoods’ death. But it is also the reason for his being in place to prevent Lovelace’s scheme from succeeding and therefore of his own subsequent rise to power. I think, though, that the character is better than that. Certainly the amulet’s theft is a 12-year-old’s petty act of revenge, made possible only by the power he commands as a magician. But his actions later, while not perfect, are driven by more noble motives: he takes the honourable, if ultimately futile, step of owning up to the theft to safeguard the Underwoods. The bravery and ingenuity he displays later in Lovelace’s house inadvertently result in the death of a magician who was trying to kill him, but his overall intent is to prevent a far-reaching scheme to overthrow the government. The fact that he himself comes out of it quite well is more of a tribute to his quick-thinking and presence of mind but is a mark also of the ambition he’s always had.

Overall, then, I’m not bothered by the magicians-and-djinni aspect of these stories. I like Bartimaeus’ ready banter but also the real, if understated, respect and affection which is starting to build between him and the young Nathaniel.