Superior Saturday

[sawyl]

Into the weekend with Superior Saturday, the penultimate in Garth Nix' Keys of the Kingdom series. Having claimed everything up to the Middle House from its former rulers, Arthur Penhaligon is positioned to take the Upper House from Saturday — not because he wants to, but because the lower domains are rotting away underneath him and he needs to do so to save the universe. Unfortunately Saturday controls the elevators and passages that allow access to the Upper House, forcing Arthur to find an unorthodox route in.

With the help of the Raised Rats and their simultaneous bottles, introduced in Drowned Wednesday, Arthur and Suzy Turquoise Blue come up with a way to sneak into the Upper House undetected. The domain is essentially a giant and ever-growing tower of mesh cubes which Saturday intends to use to break into Lord Sunday's Incomparable Gardens high overhead. But no matter how fast Saturday seems to build, the four Drasil trees that support the gardens seem to grow faster, keeping it forever out of reach.

On arrival, Arthur and Suzy join one of the work gangs, all made up of Piper's Children, who maintain the mechanisms of tower that allow Saturday to move the various cubes, each of which contains a denizen, up or down in line with their current status. As if all this wasn't unpleasant enough, the Upper House is beset by constant rain, forcing the inhabitants of each cube to shelter under an umbrella — with different colours for different ranks. Eventually Arthur works out where the sixth part of the Will of the Great Architect is located and comes up with a plan to obtain Saturday's key. But he faces a steep battle: the Newniths have manage to break through into the Upper House, making their way up the tower to confront Saturday; while, at the same time, the intrusions of Nothing in other parts of the House have caused the Drasils stop growing, finally bringing the Incomparable Gardens into Superior Saturday's reach.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Leaf finds herself caught up in a terrible situation when the army, determined to prevent the spread of plague from East Area Hospital, have decided to strike back using a series of small nuclear weapons. Fortunately, Arthur is able to giver Leaf more time to act, using the powers of the keys to slow time down, allowing her to come up with a plan to move the inhabitants of the nursing home, almost all of whom are still still unconscious, into a safer location. But still, against it all, Leaf is desperately hoping that Arthur will return with some magically solution to the problem.

The world of the Upper House is an entertaining satire on the worst excesses of workplace Darwinism, with the cubes rising and falling in accord with Saturday's whims. The cubes are deeply unpleasant places to work — although the inhabitants have umbrellas to keep off the constant rain, they don't work very well and instead seem to direct the water over the denizens whilst keeping it off their notebooks — and whenever a person gets promoted their erstwhile colleagues, envious of their advancement, take it in turns to throw things at them.

Superior Saturday is probably the most pessimistic of series. Although Arthur succeeds in obtaining Saturday's key, he does so too late to save the lower parts of the House — the destruction of which may mean the destruction of the rest of the universe — and he may be too late to save Leaf and the rest of the people trapped close to the East Area Hospital.