Book Review: City of Bones [part 8]
I've been working on this chapter for a damn long time, and I think I've just about run out of things to say about it. But before we hit the review proper, I wanna talk about the book itself. Not the content of the book; the actual object, which I am holding in my hands right this instant. I figured that if you don't know what this book looks like, you should.
It's not the most wildly impressive Photoshop job I have ever seen. In the foreground is a cityscape; no landmarks that I can spot, but let's assume it's Manhattan from context. At the bottom of the buildings (this whole foreground is pretty dark) it kind of melts into... graves? A bunch of graves? I seriously can't even tell.
And then behind the buildings is what I assume is supposed to be Jace. He is naked. The picture is cropped so that you can only see him from the mouth down, and the buildings helpfully blot out everything below his navel.
Essentially, the focal point of this cover is shirtless man chest. Which appears to be radiating a sickly, gold-green light. And right smack in the middle of this chest is a positive review of the book from none other than Stephenie Meyer.
Yeah, I just thought you guys should know.
Recap: Jace and Clary went into Madame Dorothea's apartment, where they learned that she is the adopted daughter of a witch (witches in this canon are half-demon, half-human) and that therefore she knows a good amount about Shadowhunters etc. She runs a sort of safe house for Downworlders and Shadowhunters who need to lay low. Upon discovering the secret door/magical escape portal in Dorothea's apartment, Clary ran blindly through it because the plot wanted her to.
Chapter 1
Previous chapter
City of Bones: Chapter Eight - Weapon of Choice
The Portal spits Clary out midair. She almost hits a tree. I’m not going to pass judgment quite yet as we don’t know how the door Clary went through works — maybe it sends you to a set location, maybe not — but if it is a set location, that’s a terrible location. Jace goes flying out after her, having followed her in order to keep her safe in case of danger. He lands on top of her, actually, so it takes a minute for Clary to get up, get her bearings, and realize that she’s near Luke’s house.
Obligatory location description: Williamsburg waterfront, right near the Williamsburg Bridge. Luke’s house is in back of a bookstore (Garroway Books: Fine Used, New, and Out-of-Print). Now you know.
Jace tells Clary that the Portal takes the user to whatever place they’re thinking of. Clary objects that she wasn’t thinking about Luke’s house, or, indeed, about anywhere in particular, but Jace just drops the subject. Well, I’m not gonna. Not that easy.
Okay, maybe Clary subconsciously thought of Luke’s house. Maybe she was trying to think of where her mom might have wanted to take the Portal to, in which case Luke’s house is probably a location that makes sense. But why did it spit her out midair? If you don’t have a very specific location in mind, is that what the Portal does? Because I’d be willing to accept that, but I just wanna know how the fuck this works. I shouldn’t have to spend the whole story guessing as to why things happened the way they did, and so far in this book there has been an awful lot of that.
Clary says they should probably leave, as Luke told her back in chapter whatever that he didn’t want her there. Jace says they should investigate and asks if Clary has keys to the house; Clary says no, but that sometimes Luke leaves the back door unlocked. They decide that Luke probably isn’t home, since his truck’s not there and the lights are all off, and then they… climb the fence in preparation to sneak into Luke’s house? Wait, stop.
Clary’s known this guy all her life, right? He’s an honorary uncle to her? And she’s going to sneak into his home on the suggestion of a guy she’s only known for a couple days?
Could she be any more of a doormat? Moving on.
As soon as Jace makes it over the fence, he falls right on top of something; Clary first assumes it’s a stray cat from the yowl the thing makes, but she quickly sees it’s much too big to be a cat. In fact, it’s actually Simon. Why Clary didn’t recognize her best friend sooner, or at least recognize that he was a person and not a large animal — this took her several paragraphs — I have no idea.
Simon, naturally, has been worried sick about Clary in her absence, and was hanging around Luke’s house trying to see if he could learn what happened to her when he spotted Luke stuffing a duffel bag full of weapons, some of which were glowing. We get a scene break — I should mention there was also a scene break right after Jace landed on Simon — during which Clary explains the events of the past few days to Simon. Simon declares the whole thing to be awesome, and compares it to Dungeons and Dragons. (Is it really? I mean, my D&D knowledge is minimal, but wouldn’t Simon be more likely to exclaim “Wow, this is like every shitty urban fantasy story I’ve ever read!”?) They have some uninteresting banter stemming from the fact that Jace has never heard of D&D. During this, Simon asks if there are any hot vampire babes — seriously. The whole scene is awkward and unfunny and I don’t know what the fuck to make of it. Moving on.
The three kids decide to break into Luke’s house. The door is locked after all, but Jace uses his stele to draw a Mark on the door that lets them in. Again, remember that in this universe humans apparently cannot do magic. Seriously, what do the Marks qualify as?
The space inside is dark, filled with stacks of books. Simon points out a pair of manacles on the wall, and almost makes a “that’s kinky” comment before Clary stops him. Jace takes a closer looks and notices dried blood on the manacles, and evidence that someone tried to yank the chains right out of the wall. Damn, Luke must know how to have fun.
They head into Luke’s living room, which is almost as filled with books as the bookstore itself. Clary recalls curling up in this room reading The Chronicles of Prydain when she was younger; I wanna note this because this book so far has given Clary very little in the way of personality, hobbies, or interests, and reading fantasy novels counts, right? Even though it’s almost a given for an urban fantasy protagonist to enjoy fantasy novels?
Simon notices the percolator is on and there’s hot coffee in the kitchenette. He figures from this that Luke must be still around, so instead of… I don’t know, keeping quiet? hiding? he yells to the others that he thinks Luke is still around. Nothing happens, of course.
Clary has a look around. Everything seems to be as it should be, but no sign of Luke. She goes into the guest bedroom, where she stayed often while her mother was out of town on business — hang on a minute, what business? Her mom is an artist, right? Is she traveling around doing gallery openings? Is this actually Shadowhunter business she was going on? Are we ever gonna get an explanation?
Under the bed in the guest bedroom is a backpack belonging to Clary, containing some of her clothes and toiletries (she keeps it there for when she stays at Luke’s). The backpack has some buttons on it that Simon gave her — they say stuff like “GAMERS DO IT BETTER” and “OTAKU WENCH” and I’m not sure whether that says more about Clary or Simon, since we’ve had basically no hint of Clary being either a gamer or a weeaboo while I can totally see Simon being both those things. Clary changes quickly, tosses Isabelle’s clothes in the backpack, and, taking it with her, exits the room.
(I’m excusing the above scene because it was short and because, while Clary does have horrible priorities in general, taking a couple minutes to get cleaned up when it looks like the coast is clear seems fairly reasonable.)
Jace, meanwhile, has found the duffel bag full of weapons that Simon described seeing earlier. This is where I’m starting to wonder — why so many weapons? Are demons just really, really hard to kill, or does the manner in which they can be killed vary so greatly that you need a ton of different weapons to do the trick? This doesn’t seem consistent with their depiction thus far — Clary killed one by accident, remember. Why wouldn’t something like a traditional gun work? What is the advantage to all this fancy magic stuff, especially since, from the looks of it, it’s all very difficult to master, requiring years of training and special Marks to help the user wield the weapons safely?
It’s like the old joke about Harry Potter; why couldn’t they just shoot Voldemort? Is there some reason a mundane weapon wouldn’t work?
And, again, why do you need an entire duffel bag full of weapons?
None of these questions are answered or even raised by the narrative; instead, Clary spots a picture from her apartment among Luke’s things, and realizes he must have been there following the demon attack. Jace reasons this is why the Portal led to Luke’s house — it just defaulted to the last location it was used to reach, since Clary wasn’t thinking of anything when she jumped through it. At this point I’m not going to quibble. Whatever.
I am going to quibble with the next part, though:
“Nice of Dorothea to tell us he was there,” said Clary. “He probably paid her off to be quiet. Either that or she trusts him more than she trusts us.”
Uh, did everyone forget that Clary’s apartment building is a safe house? Wouldn’t Dorothea telling people all about who’s been coming and going undermine the entire point? Also, Clary and co. vacated Dorothea’s apartment in the middle of tea, literally in the span of a few seconds. It seems plausible that maybe the good madame didn’t get to say all she wanted to say before their abrupt departure.
Simon shows up to inform Clary and Jace that someone’s coming. Rather, three someones; Luke, but he’s with two unfamiliar men. Jace asks if there’s a way out, like a back door, but Clary says there isn’t. Ten pages ago we were talking about the back door that Luke sometimes leaves unlocked. I’d say that it looks like this book was shoddily proofread, but we already knew that.
The kids hide behind a rosewood screen, which Jace draws a Mark on to make one-way transparent so they can see Luke and the other two men. The guys with Luke are big and threatening-looking, and they waste no time in having a look around, picking up Luke’s stuff (one of them quickly focuses in on a statuette of the Indian goddess Kali) and commanding the space as though they’re looking for something, or just wanna intimidate Luke, whichever. Luke looks to be in bad shape; he’s cut up, bruised and bloody.
A long conversation ensues; it’s mostly not worth relating, because it’s hard to know what they’re talking about. We do learn that Clary’s mom is alive, but unconscious. Luke gets called “Graymark” a few times, which is a wolfy-sounding name and makes me think he’s probably our token werewolf. The two men are not here to find Clary, but Valentine is looking for her. Luke acts as though he’s indifferent to Jocelyn and Clary’s fate throughout the conversation, but, given that this is probably the smartest thing to do, that doesn’t tell me much. He maintains throughout that he doesn’t wanna get involved in any of this, but he doesn’t intend to get in anybody’s way, either. The men try to bribe him with the return of Clary’s mom in exchange for the Mortal Cup (remember, the thing that turns ordinary people into Shadowhunters), but Luke says he doesn’t know where the Cup is and isn’t interested in searching for it. After about a page more of this, the men leave. Luke, gathering up the duffel bag, follows shortly after.
Clary, it seems, took the entire conversation at face value — maybe to be expected given that she has a huge emotional stake in all of this — and feels devastated to learn that Luke doesn’t care about her and her mother. Simon does suggest that Luke and those men were not on friendly terms, but of course no one listens to Simon the one time he has valuable input. Jace informs the other two that the men with Luke were the same men who killed Jace’s father. Well.
Thoughts So Far:
This is still cardboard cutout fantasy. There isn’t a trope in play here that’s not incredibly predictable. I have a feeling I’m going to have to accept this eventually as a fact of the Mortal Instruments books and stop pointing it out every chapter, but for now, yeah, I’m gonna keep pointing it out. This is unoriginal tripe.
I’m particularly bothered by the lack of personality among the main cast at this point. We’ve had plenty of time to get to know them, yet they all seem totally uninteresting to the point where I don’t even want to anymore. I feel sometimes as though I should cut the book some slack, since it’s not like this aspires to literary greatness, but there’s really no excuse for it. Being able to write compelling and varied characters is a baseline requirement for writing fiction, full stop. I don’t care if you’re writing a novel or writing dialogue for NPCs in a video game, if you are writing characters you need to be able to do this. And Cassandra Clare, it seems, cannot.
Let’s take a look at Clary. What do we know about her? She’s fifteen. She likes to draw. She likes to read fantasy novels. She’s kinda insecure about how she looks and it sometimes causes her to judge other girls harshly. She might be into video games and/or manga and/or anime; we’ve gotten almost no evidence to suggest she is but it’s been talked about a tiny bit. Beyond that, we know basically nothing about Clary as a person. And sure, minus her age, everything above is a character trait, but none of it is interesting.
“Okay,” you say, “but Clare is playing to the target audience.” That’s right, she is. There are gonna be a lot of teen girls reading this who have things in common with Clary. Liking to read fantasy novels is more or less a given, and most modern teens with a penchant for fiction have at least a bit of a taste for video games, manga, and anime. Drawing is a pretty common hobby among that crowd as well. As for the insecurity, society does a marvelous job of teaching teenage girls to feel horrible about their appearance; the entire beauty industry feeds off of this. Clary’s traits attempt to make her relatable to this book’s target audience of teen girls, but they do not make her a character in her own right, and in that way she ultimately fails at being relatable. Any real fifteen-year-old girl sharing Clary’s character traits is also worlds more complex than she, and not just by virtue of being a real person; Clary is missing great chunks of her personality by not only real-people standards, but fiction standards. What is her motivation as a character? What sets her apart from the people around her? Why does she act the way she does? What events have, in her fifteen years of life, served to shape her as a person?
Good characters impress themselves upon their readers in the way that real people impress themselves upon others they know. Clary fails to make an impression. She has the bare minimum of traits needed to make her seem like she has something in common with real people, without having any of the distinguishing features of a real person, without being interesting in the way that real people, and well-written fictional characters, are interesting.
The rest of the cast is similarly bland. Jace is a bad boy with a heart of gold (debatable so far, yes, but that’s clearly his trope), Simon is the token nerd that the audience is supposed to both laugh at and, perhaps, see themselves reflected unflatteringly in, and the two of them plus Clary form our token love triangle. The supporting cast is composed entirely of stock fantasy characters, with nary an interesting personality among them. No one ever does anything beyond what the plot requires them to do, which makes everyone seem terribly passive; this is especially bad with Clary, who doesn’t even get to do exposition like Jace or many of the side characters.
We’re also setting up the Harry Potter parallels a little too clearly, and I’m doubly suspicious given this author’s past as a big-name fan. This actually reads more or less like Harry Potter but with humor borrowed from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Which is pretty much exactly how I’ve heard Clare’s fanfic trilogy described. Interesting, that.