What I wanted from this book was (a) Abigail and Nightingale, (b) a minimum of children below the age of reason. I got enough of the former to put up with the latter, and though I think alternating Peter–Abigail chapters was a strategic mistake at this stage in the extant-fandom game, I didn’t mind this because it’s an old and honourable fantasy-novel conceit, and much more Abigail than I thought I’d get. It’s not a necessary book for the series in the way that, say, Lies Sleeping was a necessary book in what you might call the mythology arc; but as you might guess, I grew up on the X-Files, and have a deep and affectionate respect for monster-of-the-week. I wish we’d got a little more Walid, since he was ostensibly the catalyst, and I would like to know more about him and his history; a little less teenage romance, a little more weight when the foreshadowing hit (on which more later); but it was overall a pleasure.
Some old-style videogame playthrough notes:
Some heavy foreshadowing, if Beverley’s far away from her source and finding even swimming tiring.
The conversation between Brian and Indigo recalls my impression that Aaronovitch himself doesn’t know where the foxes are going in a larger-story sense.
Chapter 2: Beach Boulevard
I don’t think Peter’s parents needed to be in this at all – I think the whole band got dragged out here for the sole purpose of Zach opening a lock later – but Zach being utterly unimpressed by the platinum-record rock star, and giving the impression that although he has removed the records for secrecy he has also genuinely forgot the man’s name, is a nice touch.
Chapter 3: The Lemon Tree
I thought the gull was going to be Lesley May when it first appeared, but as much as I look forward to her reappearance, I don’t mind being wrong; she needs to sit a book out.
A nice little quickstep with the gull, the net, and the stab-proof vest. One of my favourite things in the series is how often the first pass at dealing with the supernatural fails, ignominiously, expensively, and Peter has to start all over again. It feels very realistic, for experimentation in a new discipline.
Chapter 4: What Abigail Got Up To In The Woods
Abigail and Nightingale surveying the woods behind Ambrose House! I hadn’t read Stone and Sky when I made this post, a coincidence that although not extraordinary still delights me. I suppose if Nightingale is serious about reopening it, they might go back two years on.
Nice to have explicit confirmation that Varvara is teaching Abigail. I’ve lost track of where Varvara’s actually supposed to be: presumably out of prison at some point.
‘Slotted eyes’ sounds like a goat, but if those are slit pupils, it can’t be a panther.
I do like ‘done a Peter’ for any unintended explosion.
Nightingale using emojis as shorthand with Molly and Foxglove makes no sense. Molly is perfectly literate and types, canonically, all too readily. I don’t remember whether Foxglove can read and write, but it seems unlikely she’d have a phone of her own if she can’t – not that low-literacy people don’t, many do, but that Molly seems invested in civilising her and would almost certainly insist on teaching her if she didn’t know. I suppose I can just about believe Nightingale texting Foxglove a kind of established ‘come home if you’re out, we need an anti-magic field’ symbol, though I don’t think she would be particularly good about checking her phone; but treating Molly and Foxglove as a unit in terms of their comprehension, responses, and relation to Nightingale just does not work with the rest of established canon. It has the feeling of an offhand sentence about ‘oh – visuals – Foxglove’ that didn’t get thought through.
Abigail theorising about what happens to the photons! Abigail naming her spells in Greek. Several things have come up in this book that are so satisfactorily aligned with my own extrapolations that I can only say, a-ha.
I like Abigail being able to sense Nightingale’s magic from a kilometer away.
Chapter 5: What Abigail Did About The Panther This Time
I love that the distraction Ione’s glamour offers Abigail is an understanding of what the black boxes of the formae are doing to the photons (c.f. the distraction that, say, Mama Thames’ glamour offers to Peter).
When has Abigail heard Stephanopoulos’s command voice?
Reading ancient Greek for fun! A-ha.
I feel very sorry for the panther, who did not ask for all this. At least it gets away with what sounds like only a minor wound down its side, and presumably once Albright’s dead no one is yanking it out of its home dimension any longer, and it can heal up and go back about its panther purposes.
How do foxes manage medicated shampoo? I think Aaronovitch has not been up close enough to enough foxes to know how inextricably foxy they smell.
Nightingale listening to the forest! Presumably it talks quicker than the Casterbrook grass. I like that he can’t be bothered to get up until he hears Abigail threatened.
Chapter 6: The Cream Of The Well
Beverley shedding clothes ‘with the cheerful indifference of someone who has never, ever, had to clean up after herself’ is such a good character note, as is Peter shaking out the discarded top and putting it in the travel bag.
More ‘something in the deeps’ foreshadowing.
I looked up whether ‘Essential Maths for Geoscientists’ was real: it is not only real but completely and perfectly the right intro-level book for Robert Tarry Smith. I wish I’d had it in my day.
Stud being alarmed that Peter might be picking him up is neatly handled. I also like that Peter goes for ‘taken’ rather than ‘straight’ or ‘police, mate’ to demur.
Chapter 8: What Abigail Did At The Horse Fair
‘Proper units’! I love her.
Wales, lake, power station. Thank you for this opening.
Nightingale being good with horses is lovely. I also like that Abigail is not, and her reasons for preferring machines. Varvara taking her out gliding (!) implies she’s not in prison.
Twelve-year-old Nightingale watching trains from the bridge: I wonder what he thought.
A fight on the Orient Express! Thank you for that opening.
‘But one thing about growing up as the child that ‘can take care of herself’ is that you learn to take what you need when you can get it’: one of those lines that I’m sure worked for many, does not align with me. (Similarly, the way Aaronovitch writes Abigail’s grief, which to me feels like surprisingly generic YA death-of-a-friend without any of the specific strangenesses of ‘young carer’.)
Abigail interrupting WHAT ABOUT MY CHARM. I love her. I bet that charm is going to light right up a few books from now.
Vance warning Abigail instead of Nightingale is very good. Ireland and Germany. Of course Abigail knows what’s in the basement of the Folly, and of course Peter doesn’t know that she knows.
Vance telling Abigail things about the foxes that the reader is not permitted to know increases rather than diminishes my sense that Aaronovitch is making up the foxes as he goes along.
Nightingale’s ‘serious outdoor best’ dating back to the Second World War: a-ha.
Paris, Wales, Norfolk. Indigo, stop digging. I do like Beverley being like, let the girl have her fling, I’ve got an eye on it.
Aaronovitch seems to default to Chanel when he wants ‘expensive scent’, since that’s the house he says Seawoll wears. (Irrelevantly, my money’s on Égoïste.)
Oh, I love Nightingale’s tailor working on Peter’s clothes. I don’t ship it but even I recognise the abstracted sensuality of this detail, especially the way Peter now notices clothes.
Not on your tintype was Alice MacDuffie living in a two-bedroom alone on a NERC PhD stipend. Family money or oil-bribe money or savings if she came back to do a doctorate after working, but not university money … All right, mid-thirties, we’re meant to understand she’s been in the working world a while and has come back. D’accord. But a two-bedroom even in Westhill, on the 2018/2019 stipend of less than £15,000 a year, is still a stretch; also, later, ‘doubling her salary’: presumably her former salary, since she seems to be doing the doctorate full-time. (I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for selkies, but ‘never cohabited’ stuck in my craw.)
I don’t know enough about oil extraction to know if Alice’s work is remotely realistic from the mathematical modelling side, but ‘it was supposed to be theoretical and tested out by really complicated machines but then some people in a corporation thought they could make money by risking a few human lives to do it’ is always plausible.
‘Geophysicists like to gossip as much as the next physical scientist’: false! Gossip is distributed among the physical sciences with an exponential term for fieldwork. Geophysicists are Rumours Georg. Have you ever been on a research vessel.
Chapter 10: What Abigail And Ione Did At The Museum
The confirmation that Nightingale does magic boxing with Abigail as he does with Peter is so good.
‘Flicking in and out of our world like Peter’s unicorns’ has a very jarring echo of Madeleine L’Engle. I think Abigail knows what a tesseract is but I don’t think she rates L’Engle highly.
Ah yes the they/them librarian. Aaronovitch hath penance done, and penance more will do. Where is that post that was like, why must every fantasy series have a nonbinary librarian, because I thought it was a dig at Rivers of London but then I looked in the notes and it was like four completely different series.
‘Beverley’s twin-drowning service’ made me laugh, as did ‘Wash your mouth out’ a few chapters back. Beverley gets a lot of good lines, and I have come to like her as the older self of the girl she was in the first book, whom I would not have seen coming as a serious partner for Peter; but then I like Peter better in the later books too.
Chapter 11: Rubislaw Hill
‘Abigail has spent more time in the Folly’s library than I have, probably more than anyone else in fifty years’ – a-ha.
Of course Abigail knew that the panther didn’t have the correct eyes.
Oh this was the chapter I didn’t want to reread, harm to animals. I choose to believe that Albright’s wyvern drops him into the sea from a perfectly survivable distance, or that he’s able to use magic to slow his fall: but then when he gets his head above water he realises he is surrounded by selkies. ‘In the end you will beg to drown.’
Chapter 13: Bayview Court
I can never remember clausurafrange so I’m writing it down now.
Chapter 14: What Abigail Learnt About The Queen
Nightingale telling Abigail that the most important thing he’s ever learned in his long life is how to wait is interesting. I would love to know the context, and whether he would always say the same.
Abigail extinguishing the werelight with ‘a little flourish that two out of three my teachers say is an unnecessary affectation’ – a-ha.
I am not at all sure where the Gloriana bit is going.
I like that Abigail recognises Nightingale as categorically less Fed than Peter. I also like that Nightingale has begun leaving his phone on, as opposed to only turning it on to place calls, but also that he sometimes simply forgets.
I didn’t put it together on first reading that the wyvern disappears because Peter broke Albright’s summoning circle, or at least I think that's what happens, though Albright is plainly inexpert at managing his summonings.
Chapter 15: How Abigail Came To Fall So Hard
Simon! Simon on Nanga Parbat. I like that they’re still friends and clearly still talk at length.
What was the hole in the water? Was that meant to be Abigail’s spell-gone-wrong? You don’t want to increase the distance you’re falling, presumably. Was it something Ione did?
I can take or leave the mermaid romance and I can emphatically leave Aaronovitch’s lesbian erotica phrasings, but I do like the transition with Ione singing, very much. These books are so full of swings and misses, swings and hits, line by line. Sometimes he really gets it right.
I like Abigail doing the math and working out that the extra mass is water, but there’s no way she’d know that the tail alone weighed eighty kilograms. Still, it’s a good scene.
Peter saying ‘You forget that this is Scot Land’ made me laugh. This is scene is not exactly that, but one of my favourite phenomena that shows up every now and again in Rivers of London is the weirdly predictable way that when you encounter a certain type of grandiose person – I say person but all the ones I’ve ever met have been men – you can repeat back their own ideas to them in exaggerated, over-the-top form, and they will genuinely accept this without suspicion, even as you yourself think ‘No one could fall for this. And this is a grown man, with money, with all the external markers of success’. It is a bizarre experience. Aaronovitch has clearly had it. It would, absolutely, happen again and again in Peter’s line of work.
More giant squid foreshadowing.
‘What happened to your safety gear’ is such an awful Chekhov’s gun of a question. Peter and Beverley discussing what would happen to her down there is another.
Chapter 18: What Abigail Did When She Woke Up The Next Morning
A contrast I enjoy: Peter describing Nightingale in one of the early books as ‘a superb driver’, and Peter in this one having insisted that Abigail be taught to drive by someone other than Nightingale, ‘on account of Nightingale’s relaxed attitude to the Highway Code, speed limits and the laws of physics’. These are not incompatible positions, only very funny when meant to be held simultaneously.
Chapter 19: What Abigail Did To The School
I see Abigail uses ‘Nightingale’ in thought but is careful to refer to him as Thomas aloud, one of those inversions that I like.
I appreciate that Walid has stepped in and nixed the processed foods for the foxes, though they’d probably do still better with dried crickets or something.
I love Nightingale turning to Abigail and saying, easily, ‘Suggestions?’ And then the matter-of-fact deference. ‘Omne vetus novatur … Carry on.’
Nightingale saying ‘Peter’s specialty’ is to confuse his opponent! Peter gets such relentless ball-busting in the background here. I especially like this set against Tobias Winter’s senpai crush.
‘The dig I went on in Norfolk when the sea was eating the cliffs’. And thank you for that opening. Abigail does a lot of flirting with death by water, I cannot help but notice.
‘Doing his voice-of-the-patriarchy thing’ is an instantly recognisable tone. I thought it was kind of a penance line when I read it, but rereading it, I have to concede that when I read it I know exactly how Atlas sounded.
Abigail does freeze up and get rescued by Indigo quite often, in a very comics-ish, stagey way.
‘You step on this lot.’ ‘Abigail.’ Half vexed, half amused. Oh I love them. I forgive this book everything, or I will by the last chapter.
Chapter 20: The Diving Skid
I love Beverley putting the fear of the depths into Carroll. You have decided to go where the Hague couldn’t save you. So good.
I also appreciate the wyvern turning on Albright and administering either death or delivery to the selkies.
But! Beverley and the diving bell. The one place, I think, that this book lets itself down.
I do not want any real harm to come to Beverley: certainly not death. But after so much foreshadowing, the abrupt television-style default to ‘no, nothing bad happened, she saved herself, it was all fine’ is very flat. What’s exasperating is that there’s been so much to set her up for hubris – all these reminders of, you are far away from your source, you are out of your home territory, you can be hurt here, and while I respect her gamble of going down to warn the divers, it feels cheap for there to be literally no consequences for her when things go wrong, and for her to need no one’s help.
I spent the whole book reading her as being set up to make almost one of the genre of serious, potentially fatal mistakes that people made in the early days of nuclear physics – the kind of mistake that happens not because you’re stupid but because you’ve got catastrophically used to being the smartest person in the room, never explaining what you’re doing because no one will understand you anyway, and being one of the surreally few people in the entire world who understands what you’re working with. The dangerous informality of the extremely small discipline, if you will. But she can have that kind of miscalculation without being seriously hurt or killed – it’s a world full of magic, there are multiple magical creatures in the ocean right there with her that could have saved her, why in the world not have the obliging giant squid lift her slowly back up. I know the selkies untethered the bell and so it was not technically all her, but I still find it difficult to believe that she could manually lower the pressure above it all the way up from the seabed, when swimming had been difficult – I can just about believe that she could manage it under conditions of ‘I must do this or my daughters will be motherless’ extremity, but I cannot believe that she would hop out and be perfectly fine afterwards. Some minor mention of, like, ‘oh sorry can’t freeze this ice-pack yet’, needing to get nearer her source again to replenish her magic, or ‘ow, came up a bit quick, hard on the joints’ would have gone a long way.
Chapter 21: The High Road
A good chapter title. I haven’t mentioned, but I enjoy Andrew Rae as a character. ‘Not everybody’s going to want to be your friend.’
Slightly weird that Peter notes the BrewDog Punk unquestioningly but thought all the beer names in the shebeen sounded made-up, since Hazy Jane is also BrewDog. I am sorry, but no one in this book is drinking good beer.
Nightingale saying ‘I was rather hoping for more of a holiday’ – you were not. You were hoping to divert your grieving apprentice, in which you exceeded, surely, even your own aspirations. Not that I do not think Nightingale deserves any number of long holidays; but he couldn’t have expected it with this entourage.
Chapter 22: What Abigail Did At The End
Nightingale giving Abigail a stern look for putting her tent away wet charms me. I like it both as an intrinsic character note and as a marker of ‘raised in an era where goods were much less disposable’. Nightingale would clean pruning shears with turpentine and mineral oil every time. An example to us all.
I hope Abigail and Ione can make it work, though my only real investments are Abigail & Nightingale and Abigail/Scholarships.
One last bit of grousing: Beauregard On The Pan-American Express
I deeply resent exclusive content and double-resent being pressured into buying from a chain, but I resented still more the time it took me to track down a Waterstones copy of Amongst Our Weapons for its particular short story; and I knew that July was going to contain some personal longueurs, so for once I gave in and took the easy way and pre-ordered Stone and Sky to be sent straight to the house. But good grief, that was no ‘Miroslav’s Fabulous Hand’, was it. It reads like a very rushed fandom exchange fill: unsporting to complain if you’re the recipient; but since it is, instead, the bait that I paid for, I am free to say that if I had known I wouldn’t have bothered. I don’t mind Gussie and Aaronovitch doesn’t do his pastiche-y voice badly, but there is nothing in this story besides ‘three people come on to him and then he gets inexplicably arrested’. I suppose, on rereading, the joke is supposed to be that Beauregard engineered the situation to allow the stock ‘girl about to be married off against her will’ character to escape and Gussie’s apparent irresistibility ensured it, but it’s a very thin seventeen pages.
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