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Attracted by the promise of steampunk, magic, parallel worlds, and librarians as action heroes, the decision to read Genevieve Cogman's debut, The Invisible Library was pretty easy to make. Happily, I wasn't disappointed. The setting is an enjoyable and surprisingly coherent blend of various different systems of magic and technology, the character are a fun mix and the heroine, Irene, is suitably knowing and self-aware — she has read enough Conan Doyle to be pleased to be working with the distinctly Holmsian Peregrin Vale but also aware enough to find first hand involvement with someone of his mental prowess more than a little irritating!

The book opens with Irene on a routine mission to recover a rare treaty on necromancy for the Library from a parallel reality. Outwitting gargoyles and hellhounds and teenage wizards, she escape back to the Library from the world of the magical boarding school with her prize, only to find herself immediately assigned to something new. Under the guise of improving Irene's mentoring skills, her boss Coppelia has allocated her a new trainee, Kai, and given them the task of recovering a copy of Grimm's Fairytales from an adjacent reality. Expecting a walk in the park, Irene is concerned to discover that their destination has been quarantined due to high levels of chaos and worried to find another Librarian, her long-time rival Bradamant, trying to muscle in on their recovery.

Arriving the parallel London, Irene and Kai discover from the Library's local representative that events have out-paced them: the previous owner of the book, the vampire Lord Wyndham, has been murdered and the book stolen by a cat-burglar calling herself Belphagor. Undeterred Irene dispatches Kai to investigate the Liechtenstein Embassy, which she believe to be a hot-bed of Fae activity, while she breaks into Wyndham's house to search his study for clues. While attempting to open his lordship's safe, Irene is cornered by Silver, a powerful Fae and the Liechtenstein ambassador, who also seems to be interested in the book.

Slipping out of Silver's attempts to enthral her, Irene meets Kai for lunch only to discover that her pupil has been tailed to the meeting by another of the affair's significant players: the famous private detective Peregrin Vale. Lunch is interrupted by the emergence of a giant mechanical centipede from the sewers and by an attempt to steal Irene's bag. Following Vale's departure, the pair split up in an attempt to shake off their pursuers. But while Irene is attempting to use the crowds of Covent Garden for cover she receives a urgent and intrusive message from the Library: Beware Alberich. Alberich, Irene later explains to Kai, is the almost legendary monster the Librarians use to frighten themselves with: the only Librarian to ever go rogue, Alberich has been on the run for over 500 years, easily defeating the Librarians sent to capture him and cheerfully sending parts of their dismembered bodies back to their colleagues in distinctively neat paper parcels.

From this point on, events rapidly become more complicated. Irene, Kai and Vale work together to investigate Silver, only to find themselves fighting alligators, dodging werewolves, and, in Irene's case, dealing with the extra complication of Bradamant's sudden appearance at the heart of events. As the story unfolds, we gradually get guarded hints about the backstories of the leading characters: Irene is a rare child of Librarian parents who has, uniquely, also become a Librarian herself; Kai, who shows the a chameleon-like ability to adapt his social status, has obviously lied about his past to get himself taken on as new recruit; Vale, the Earl of Leeds, has broken from his own family to play detective; while Bradamant, despite her ruthless practicality, clearly has the best interests of the Library at heart and values her position all the more because, as seems likely, she has had to struggle to achieve it.

Enjoyable and engagingly written, the various different systems of magic integrate sensibly together — from the chaos of the Fae, the systematic magic of the boarding school, to the Librarians' ability to control reality using pure Language — while Irene's explanation about why the transplanting of technologies from one reality to another generally fails prevents endless what-if questions about why they can't simply introduce mobile phones into the steampunk world.

(Entertainingly, to me as an opera nerd at least, was the Librarians' tendency to draw on musical sources for their various noms-de-guerre.

For the non-nerdy, Irene an appears in Handel's Theodora and another in Tamerlano, although given her enthusiasm for crime fiction I suspect Cogman's Irene is more likely to have taken her name from A Scandal in Bohemia than anywhere else. Bradamant is another easy one, appearing in Handel's Alcina and Vivaldi's Orlando furioso to name but a couple of operas based on Ariosto's poem, her boss Kostchei is the title character in an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, while Belphagor comes courtesy of Ottorino Resphighi.

Alberich is obviously the master manipulator and principal villain of Der Ring des Nibelungen, the Nibelung renounces love to forge the Ring and whose uses its power enslaves his fellows — which, given that he selected his own name on joining the Library, suggests he was probably bad from the very start. Coppelia, Irene's boss who possesses wooden limbs, diverges slightly from the pattern by drawing her name from a ballet by Delibes rather than an opera — for although The Tales of Hoffmann includes similar episode based on Der Sandmann by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Dr Coppelius' doll is named Olympia so I don't think it really counts!)

So while there are some moments where the plot doesn't quite dovetail together quite as neatly as it might, these don't detract from a extremely enjoyable and accomplished first novel. I'm already looking forward to the next novel in the series to see whether any of my guesses about the characters are borne out...
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August 2018

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