The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Jonathan Stroud
Jun. 16th, 2023 10:35 pmI read all three books of the Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud—though I suppose it’s actually a four-book sequence. I skipped the prequel. It didn’t have my fave in it.
To be honest, I’ve been sitting on this writeup for a while, I think because blitzing through three books in a week was unusual for me and made it a little difficult to process all of them. I think, overall, what I would say is: I had fun, I got out of them what I expected, and I probably won’t be reading more YA or fantasy lit any time soon.
Spoilers behind the cut tags.
( Broad Summaries )
So I messaged![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yletylyf partway into book two and said, I paraphrase, “ughhh I hate this new protagonist (Kitty). She seems to exist just as a contrast to Nathaniel, as someone to be Good. But he’s just a 14 year old kid! Every time he does something bad, and yeah it can be bad, all I think about is that he’s a child and the choices are to do the bad thing or jeopardize his own life. The other magicians would happily have him put to death! They are often actively trying to kill him!”
And then, after a few minutes more complaining: “Oh, I think I’m just angry that this is YA.”
I think it’s interesting that a YA series did grey morality. I think that Nathaniel is earnestly possible to view as a villain. But he’s younger than the students I teach—I really struggle to ascribe full agency and blame to him for the mix of ambition and fear that pushes him to keep aligning himself with an oppressive government. Maybe if I’d read the series when it was released in 03-05, instead of now… ? As it stands, Nathaniel is just too sad and traumatized for me to really view him as carrying intentional malice.
( Repression, Names, and Loyalty )
Ultimately, I really connected with this as a possible fic fandom. The books were fun but I was clearly not their target audience, and I appreciate that the ways they grated on me (My dislike for Kitty; Nathaniel being too young for me to blame) were a result of that mismatch. But, well, that’s suitably inspiring for the sort of what-if divergence that I enjoy writing. I’m playing with that now, and I really do love the potential for a toned-down version of Bartimaeus’ voice, which keeps snark and grandiosity but ages them up. I love the potential of this human/nonhuman ship for its innate conflict: about their shared past, about their respective roles in this world, about the ways they hurt one another. I love the complexity of Nathaniel’s status as a boy-genius and worse for it, and Bartimaeus’ status as an ancient being at once in love with our world and only able to access it through servitude. It’s a fantasy re-imagining of class and status issues, but I adore class and status issues in all their forms, and I am eager to pick these ones apart, at least for one project.
To be honest, I’ve been sitting on this writeup for a while, I think because blitzing through three books in a week was unusual for me and made it a little difficult to process all of them. I think, overall, what I would say is: I had fun, I got out of them what I expected, and I probably won’t be reading more YA or fantasy lit any time soon.
Spoilers behind the cut tags.
( Broad Summaries )
So I messaged
yletylyf partway into book two and said, I paraphrase, “ughhh I hate this new protagonist (Kitty). She seems to exist just as a contrast to Nathaniel, as someone to be Good. But he’s just a 14 year old kid! Every time he does something bad, and yeah it can be bad, all I think about is that he’s a child and the choices are to do the bad thing or jeopardize his own life. The other magicians would happily have him put to death! They are often actively trying to kill him!”And then, after a few minutes more complaining: “Oh, I think I’m just angry that this is YA.”
I think it’s interesting that a YA series did grey morality. I think that Nathaniel is earnestly possible to view as a villain. But he’s younger than the students I teach—I really struggle to ascribe full agency and blame to him for the mix of ambition and fear that pushes him to keep aligning himself with an oppressive government. Maybe if I’d read the series when it was released in 03-05, instead of now… ? As it stands, Nathaniel is just too sad and traumatized for me to really view him as carrying intentional malice.
( Repression, Names, and Loyalty )
Ultimately, I really connected with this as a possible fic fandom. The books were fun but I was clearly not their target audience, and I appreciate that the ways they grated on me (My dislike for Kitty; Nathaniel being too young for me to blame) were a result of that mismatch. But, well, that’s suitably inspiring for the sort of what-if divergence that I enjoy writing. I’m playing with that now, and I really do love the potential for a toned-down version of Bartimaeus’ voice, which keeps snark and grandiosity but ages them up. I love the potential of this human/nonhuman ship for its innate conflict: about their shared past, about their respective roles in this world, about the ways they hurt one another. I love the complexity of Nathaniel’s status as a boy-genius and worse for it, and Bartimaeus’ status as an ancient being at once in love with our world and only able to access it through servitude. It’s a fantasy re-imagining of class and status issues, but I adore class and status issues in all their forms, and I am eager to pick these ones apart, at least for one project.
