City of Bones

Having spent large amounts of time over the last couple of weeks lying on my side, waiting for my ear problems to clear up, I've found the time to zip through a few of Cassandra Clare's Shadowhunters novels, starting with City of Bones, the first in her Mortal Instruments series. Not entirely sure what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised to find them extremely enjoyable and engaging.

One night normal Brooklyn teenager Clarissa Fray happens to see a three kids of around her own age luring a boy out of nightclub. ut all is not what it seems: the boy is a demon and the others, Alec, Isabelle and Jace, are the only thing standing between humanity and the monsters. So far, so normal, but it isn't long before Clary comes home to find her mother vanished, a demon in her apartment, and her mother's almost-boyfriend Luke distinctly unhelpful. Picked up by the three children and taken to the Institute, a repurposed gothic cathedral hidden by a glamour, Clary learns that she too is a shadowhunter with the power to manipulate supernatural runes — something the others stress isn't magic, but might as well be. From Hodge Starkweather, the childrens' tutor, Clary learns that not only was her mother a famous shadowhunter back in the Old Country, a hidden place called Idris, but her father was actually Valentine Morgenstern, a radical outcast with some distinctly dodgy political views who was thought to have been killed in the fire that supposedly also killed her mother.

Once Clary starts investigating her past, she discovers that a warlock called Magnus Bane has put a spell on her to block her ability to see the supernatural. Gatecrashing one of Bane's parties, Clary's friend Simon unwisely downs a cocktail in an attempt to impress Isabelle Lightwood and promptly turns into a rat. This triggers a sequence of events that ends up with a raid on the headquarters of the local vampires and the recovery of Simon the Rat, who promptly turns back into a human. After meeting Bane, the cloud over Clary's vision starts to lift and she realises that her mother may have been kidnapped by her father, who remains very much alive, as part of his plan to recover the Mortal Cup, a chalice used to give the original shadowhunters their powers.

When Clary belated realises that she may know where her mother has hidden the Cup, she triggers a great rush of events as Alec and Isabelle Lightwood, Jace Wayland, and Clary Fray, sometimes assisted by Clary's long-suffering friend Simon try to recover it from its place of concealment. But almost as soon as the Cup is found, the children are betrayed and find themselves up against the conniving and manipulative Valentine, who has clearly been playing an extremely long game indeed.

City of Bones combines breakneck action with a great deal of emotional heartache and wrangling, in which the main characters all seem to suffer some sort of impossible and unrequited love for each other: Alec is in love with Jace, but too in the closet to admit it; Simon has spent years pining after an oblivious Clary; Clary has started to think she might be in love with JC, but just as a she does, they both learn something that makes it completely impossible. In fact the only character not to have a tortuous love life is Isabelle, who has a sort-of crush on Simon, but doesn't seem all that serious about it.

The world building is nicely handled, pulling in all everything from fairies and warlocks, werewolves and vampires, to angels and demons. There is an absolute divide in abilities which prevents humans from doing magic, but which allows the shadowhunters, who have an angelic lineage, to use tattooed Marks which have a supernatural effect. The shadowhunters have their own very definite culture — with a distinctly unpleasant line in sneering at mundane humanity — and their own rigid rules of engagement. The rigidity of shadowhunter culture partly explains the Circle, the group founded by Valentine Morgenstern initially as reform movement but later becoming vehicle for Valentine's ambitions, whose members — including the Lightwoods' parents and Jace's father Michael, and Hodge, their tutor — were drawn from the great and good of Idris' society.

Rather to my surprise, I enjoyed the book hugely. I'm a bit of sucker for good urban fantasy with solid world building, and this really worked for me. I liked the uncertainly of the characters and their slightly overwrought affections, despite realising partway through one that Luke and Jocelyn and the Lightwoods are almost certainly supposed to be younger than me — but that's already because Luke seems to be just as unsure about what he wants from life as I am and, similarly, seems to have drifted into his current situation rather than actively seeking it out. It doesn't hurt that the book is tightly plotted and maintains its momentum, despite all the emotional upheavals which threaten to push things off course, while Clare's writing is polished with plenty of witty, largely thanks to Jace Wayland, out-and-out snarky dialogue.