The Golem's Eye

At the end of the 19th Century the British forces are advancing on Prague, capital of an empire whose power has waned. The British leader Gladstone uses the tremendous magical power trapped in his staff to destroy the city’s defences. Bartimaeus is among the Djinni charged with protecting the Czech emperor. He is on the point of being destroyed by an enemy Afrit when his own master is killed in the same action and he returns to the Other Place.

A hundred years later Nathaniel, at 14, is now the most junior member of the Department for Internal Affairs under the tutelage of Jessica Whitwell. He’s skilled, ambitious and vain and disliked by his colleagues. He’s trying to track down the members of the Resistance, a small but persistent group of Commoners reponsible for attacks on Magicians’ properties and the theft of magical artefacts. As his investigation begins a whole row of shops in Piccadilly is ransacked by a large and destructive force which leaves no magical traces behind but which annihilates anything in its path.

Kitty Jones is a young member of the Resistance movement. She is immune to magical attack and consequently survived almost untouched an attack by a Magician’s demon which left her friend Jakob scarred for life. Enraged by the Magician’s arrogance and by the travesty of justice which followed, she has joined the elderly Mr Pennyfeather in his Southwark art shop which serves as the headquarters of the Resistance.

Nathaniel is tasked with finding the perpetrator of the Piccadilly break-ins and the Resistance if they are not one and the same. Aware that many Djinni will be summoned by Magicians for surveillance use, he summons Bartimaeus himself to prevent that Djinn from revealing his true name to anyeone else. Bartimaeus is disgruntled but is threatened and cajoled into acting for Nathaniel. He organises the surveillance but is unable to prevent a second destructive break-in at the National Gallery. He is on the spot, however, as an intruder enters the British Museum and he recognises it as a Golem, a type of magical being not seen since the fall of Prague. Attempting to overcome the magic-defeating Golem, he ends up crushed beneath the wreckage of a wing of the Museum.

Mr Pennyfeather has made contact with a scholar unsympathetic to the Magicians’ cause who is able to give the Resistance inside information and to put them in touch with a benefactor. This anonymous patron will help the group to rob Gladstone’s tomb of its magical items in return for a few of those items for his collection. The Resistance are cautious but the lure of the powerful items and the uproar the theft would cause motivate them and they agree to the scheme.

Nathaniel, whose efforts were unable to prevent the destruction at the British Museum, is out of favour with the Prime Minister but is given a last chance: he is sent to Prague to make contact with any magicians there who might have retained the secret of making and animating Golems, an ability believed lost when the British Empire defeated the Czechs a century before. Because of the delicate relations between London and Prague he travels incognito and meets the British Government’s somewhat ghoulish local agent, Harlequin, in secret. The agent directs him to a local magician, Kavka, but Nathaniel’s presence in Prague is betrayed. Harlequin in killed and Nathaniel narrowly avoids capture by the local authorities. He finds Kavka who has been commissioned to create a Golem’s scroll with the promise that his children, Czech spies captured in London, will be freed. Nathaniel is surprised by the arrival of the Mercenary who guarded Lovelace’s house two years before. He has come to claim the scroll and is prepared to kill Nathaniel and Bartimaeus in the process. Kavka destroys the scroll causing a magical backlash which enables Nathaniel to escape.

In London, Kitty and the small Resistance group have gone to Gladstone’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. With help from their benefactor they avoid the Pestilence guarding the tomb entrance but are ambushed by Gladstone’s skeleton which forms a material host for the Afrit Honorious, tasked with guarding the tomb and its contents. All of the Resistance members die except Nick, who runs away, and Kitty who stays to help the others but who finally escapes with Gladstone’s Staff, the only item they’ve managed to salvage. The Afrit, insane after years of solitude, takes to the rooftops in pursuit of Kitty and Nick.

Nathaniel returns empty-handed from Prague amid the chaos caused by the attempted burglary, and his story is given little credibility. Dismissed from the Prime Minister’s inner circle, he follows up the only lead he has: the identity of Kitty Jones whom he had briefly encountered years before when hiding out in London. He ambushes her at her parent’s home but her magical resistance helps her escape. While Bartimaeus is helping other Djinni to trap Honorious, Nathaniel is consulting Quentin Makepeace, a colourful impresario who has the Prime Minister’s ear and who seems to favour Nathaniel. At his suggestion, Nathaniel uses Bartimaeus to capture Jakob, Kitty’s childhood friend, and takes him to a disused warehouse, making sure that Kitty knows. As expected, she comes to rescue Jakob but they are all ambushed by the Night Police under Jane Farrar, Nathaniel’s rival. Bartimaeus helps Kitty to escape but Nathaniel and Jakob are arrested and taken to the Prime Minister. Nathaniel talks his way out of arrest but is forced to return under magical guard to where Kitty is hidden to retrieve Gladstone’s Staff from her keeping.

While they are waiting, Kitty & Bartimaeus talk and the Djinn opens the girl’s eyes to the way things are between Magicians and Djinni and the patterns of history which he has witnessed: empires rising and falling, brought down by internal dissent and increasingly magic-resilient populations able to overcome the Magicians’ power-base. When Nathaniel arrives, they go to fetch the staff but Nathaniel, observed from afar, refuses to honour his promise to free Kitty and Jakob. At this point, the Golem arrives. Nathaniel tries to wield the staff, most powerful of Gladstone’s magical possessions, but only succeeds in knocking himself out. Kitty is about to run away, but instead uses her magical resilience to come close enough to the Golem to pull out its scroll and disable it, saving Nathaniel’s life. She and the boy escape, but when Nathaniel awakes, Bartimaeus tells him that they both died saving him.

The disabled Golem uses its remaining energy to return to its creator. Nathaniel, carrying Gladstsone’s staff, follows it through the streets of London to see who’s controlling it. The creature makes for Westminster and the chamber where the Ministers of the Government are currently meeting. The Golem collapses in front of Duvall, chief of the Night Police. He’s arrested but jumps to his death out of his fourth-floor prison window. Nathaniel is rewarded with the post of Minister of Internal Affairs. Jakob leaves for Belgium but Kitty, moved by her conversation with Bartimaeus, decides to stay in Britain.