Tag: mystery

228: magic and moonlight

This week’s tube journeys have been accompanied by Joanne Harris’s latest novel, The Moonlight Market, which is being marketed as ‘Neverwhere meets Stardust‘ (the marketing team at her publishers are probably cursing themselves). I love both those books, and also am a huge fan of everything else by Joanne Harris, so that I was going to read this was a given.

But…it’s also set in London. London Below, London Before, London today – the London we see in front of us, the London that might be waiting for us down one of those intriguing little alleyways that the older parts of the City (and the city, I suppose) do so well, the London that might be there if you catch it in the corner of your eye. Clerkenwell and Farringdon have many of these, and I am easily distracted by the thought of magic and adventure.* I blame growing up with books where statues came to life in gardens; where forests grow in naughty children’s bedrooms and you can sail away to the land where the wild things are; where there was a permanently frosted world through the back of a wardrobe; and a house full of Civil War ghost children, ebony mice that come to life and lost jewels.

You might say London has enough stories to be going on with, without making up more, but one of the best things about a city with more than 2000 years of stories and people is that there will always be room for more. London, as Peter Ackroyd and Edward Rutherfurd have proved, is enough of a story in itself.

However, people do keep writing these stories, for which I am profoundly grateful. The Moonlight Market is a story about a London man who works in a camera shop on Caledonian Road (‘the Cally’, as it’s known locally) who falls suddenly, unexpectedly in love with a woman who is (of course) more than she seems. A photographer himself, he discovers that his negatives show things that can’t be seen in daylight, and his search for these places and people lead him to the Moonlight Market on a London Bridge that only exists on moonlit nights. Threaded through this is a fairytale about the doomed affair between the Moth King and the Butterfly Queen, and the resulting war between the Silken Folk of the day and night courts. Like her Chocolat series, magic exists and co-exists with the mundane world, and sometimes crosses over – all the best urban fantasy is filled with possibility, of course, and Harris’s books are filled with it.

If you love urban fantasy and London, here’s a few more worlds you can explore:

  • Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series
  • Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels
  • Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (I am extremely disappointed in recent revelations about him, but I still love this book)
  • Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus series
  • Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series
  • Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series
  • Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations
  • Neil Blackmore’s Soho Blue (not magical, but worlds colliding and some of the most evocative writing about post-war London I’ve ever come across)

A good writer makes the setting as much a part of the story as the characters and the action. I first understood this when I did a module at uni called ‘The City in the American Mind’, which introduced me to Sara Paretsky’s Chicago through the eyes of V.I. Warshawski. I’d probably be terribly disappointed if I visited – in my head Vic’s office is in a classic noir setting in ‘the Loop’ , there’s vast tracts of post-industrial wasteland, and there’s a Great Lake smack in the middle. Similarly, Dave Robicheaux’s swampy, louche and lush Louisiana (James Lee Burke is the author here) would not live up to my visions, and if I go to San Francisco I want it to be in Armistead Maupin’s 1970s rather than today. Clearly I need a time-travelling Doctor….but again, that’s another story.

*This probably explains why I get lost a lot on the way back from meetings….if I walk down there, surely it will lead to there (it often doesn’t, but what possibility of magic and adventure would there be if I just walked straight down St John Street to the office?

Other things making me happy this week:

  • Coffee with Brian on his last day ever at Museum of London. Hashtag end of an era or something.
  • Trip with some of the team to the Tower Bridge Experience. Team now convinced I know people EVERYWHERE as one of the bridge hosts is a double-ex colleague from both MoL Docklands and V&A.
  • Finishing week four of C25K without injury. Crossing fingers, touching wood etc, and sticking everything together with RockTape.
  • Finishing a sashiko-stitched cat bag
  • Being able to sit in the garden and work surrounded by plants and sunshine. My Beloved’s new garden shelter is coming on well.
  • Taking the lovely Matt Shaw round the site in preparation for a new project, watched by this pretty fox.
  • Cinnamon buns for breakfast courtesy of Thing 2

Things making me fall about laughing this week:

The Museum of London’s new logo. Sorry, London Museum. I can see what you were thinking but sparkly guano and a discombobulated flying rat aren’t doing it for me.

Still, I spotted the model when I was out with the team at Tower Bridge:

What do they want, glitter on it?

Today I am off for a swim with Isla, and I might even make something. You never know….

Kirsty x

Cover image: Network Rail

What I’ve been reading:

The Life of a Scilly Sergeant – Colin Taylor

The Secret Hours – Mick Herron

The Children of Green Knowe/The River at Green Knowe/The Chimneys of Green Knowe/An Enemy at Green Knowe – Lucy M. Boston

The Moonlight Market – Joanne Harris (Audible)

202: my body is in the chair but my mind could be anywhere

On a trip up to Upper Street in Islington this week I was secretly quite excited to spot the estate agent Hotblack Desiato, whose name(s) were borrowed by Douglas Adams for the frontman of his fictitious rock band Disaster Area in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, book two of the The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. I’ve seen it before, of course, as I find myself frequently at that end of Islington for work at the moment, but it never fails to make me smile and I will always associate it with Ford Prefect. I wonder how many houses they have sold to Adams fans?

H2G2 – as it’s affectionately known – was probably one of my earliest introductions to SF/F, as my Dad had the original trilogy up on the top level of his bookshelf along with Anthony and Asimov (it was a very well-organised bookshelf, which filled an alcove in our living room and he made it to measure using wooden dowels and things. It was also very full). I still love it (though not the final Eoin Colfer addition, that’s bloody awful), although some of the other SF/F I was reading at the time is now a little dated, especially some of the sword and sorcery and Robert Heinlein, who was a very odd chap.

Places that appear in much loved books have such a hold on the imagination that sometimes I am afraid to visit them in case they don’t live up to it. I have read so much about Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans (OK, in crime novels, but still) that if they didn’t have the noir of my imagination I’d be very disappointed. I blame an American Studies module called ‘Images of the City in the American Mind’ for this – one of Sara Paretsky’s V.I Warshawski novels was on the reading list, featuring a wintry Chicago as a looming backdrop. The equivalent American Gothic course failed to capture my imagination in the same way, for some reason: Moby Dick, meh.

Similarly, I’d love to go to San Francisco after reading Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (thank you Amanda for introducing me to these) but only in the 1970s and 80s. 1930s Berlin as lived by Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin (the one Cabaret was based on) is also on my time-travel bucket list. The magical France of Joanne Harris’s Chocolat series, Charles De Lint’s Newford, Tony Hillerman’s Navajo country – all these places have physical presence in my mind. I need a TARDIS or a bridge to Terabithia or something.

Even places I know well are enhanced by that fictional overlay, especially if what you’re reading is a little bit atmospheric and magical. Right now I’m re-re-re-reading Phil Rickman‘s Merrily Watkins series, set around the Welsh border country where we grew up and featuring a Diocesan exorcist. Drawing occasionally from local folklore (black hounds, apples and more which you can also read about in Ella Mary Leather’s Folklore of Herefordshire) and more modern aspects of Herefordshire (the SAS), along with aspects of police procedurals and mysteries, I recommend them frequently. Especially to people who also grew up there and understand just how weird it can be at times. His standalones are also good, with enough recurring characters across them all to build a believable world – Glastonbury, the border again, and a mossy bit of Manchester. (Phil, if you’re reading, can you crack on with the next Merrily please and thank you? At some point I’m going to run out again.) The TV adaptation of the first couple of books was dire, unfortunately, despite the presence of Anna Maxwell Martin as Merrily. The novels are grounded enough to be believable - as Phil himself says,

The aim here has been to keep it all as real and authentic as possible while allowing subtle elements of the uncanny to creep in, just as they often do in real-life. If I find I’ve written something I can’t believe could happen or be perceived to have happened, it has to be drastically re-written, or it has to go.

Phil Rickman, in A Letter from Ledwardine

There’s probably a link here to my other reading pile of pyschogeography books – Ian Sinclair, Tim Moore, and other people armed with an A-Z and handy with a pen. London fascinates me in fact and in fiction and – unlike many of the places listed above – is easily accessed.

This week my team and I are having our monthly meeting at the British Library to see their Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition, and the Malorie Blackman one if we have time.

Other things making me happy this week

  • An early morning walk through to Toot Hill on Saturday – chilly and sunny and it’s baby cow season already
  • Early coffee with Amanda in London
  • Late afternoon coffee with Cath in Epping
  • Making a personalised toadstool for Miriam’s birthday in her favourite colours
  • Lots of cross stitch and crochet
  • A really good nap (or ‘quality time with Lulu’, as she usually joins me for these siestas)
  • A Museums Association training course on Wellbeing at Work.

And that’s it for me for the week – I have some reading to do, you know.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

To Dream of the Dead/The Secrets of Pain/The Magus of Hay – Phil Rickman

The Chalice – Phil Rickman (Audible)