Rivers of London: Black Mould

Places have stories. Any traveler is aware of this idea, and writers are exquisitely aware of it. Many writers are fine hands at making places integral to their stories: landscapes can become epics of geography; lakes and rivers and the ocean itself can sing lyrics as varied and endless as the sounds water can produce. But if one must conceive of a place as a character, then one need not look any farther than a city: that concentration of humanity that seems to imprint its own unique identity upon the spot of earth it springs from. The character of a city is shaped by the humans that inhabit it, just as much as those humans are shaped by it. Currently, a popular trend has been to write about a city and its populace, in all its glory and shame, with an added supernatural element: history and folklore old and new come together to give any city a little something special.

Of course, some cities lend themselves better to such efforts than others. New Orleans, with its ties to voodoo and Cajun culture, is a favorite for American writers. For British writers, though, they need not look much farther than the City: or London, to those of us who don't live there. And it is in London that Ben Aaronovitch sets Rivers of London.

Rivers of London is the first book in a (hopefully lengthy) series of books centered around Peter Grant, the lead character of Rivers of London and of the series itself. Peter Grant is a policeman - a “copper” in the parlance of the book - and he thinks he's headed for a dead-end desk job, but it turns out he's meant for bigger, grander things. It turns out he's meant to be a wizard. And he will have to learn the ropes fast, because there is a lot of work that needs doing: cleaning out vampires, for a start, and negotiating between two opposing deities laying claim to the Thames River and all its tributaries. And then there are those strange murders going on in London, the cause of which needs to be found, and stopped, because if not, London itself will implode.

Now, I have read quite a few urban fantasy books that play on something like this. I have read China Mieville's Kraken, which also uses the city of London as a primary staging-ground for all sorts of supernatural activity. Jim Butcher's Dresden series is one of my favorites, a series whose main character is a wizard who solves supernatural crimes. And before sex and romance became the primary preoccupation of the storyline, the Anita Blake books were quite a good read, too. But of these books, it was the Dresden novels I've loved the most, and in many ways, what I love about Jim Butcher's work is also what I love about Rivers of London.

And indeed, there's plenty similar between the two of them. They both feature lead characters who are wizards, and who are both not comfortable with the inevitable comparisons to Harry Potter (though Peter Grant must feel it more keenly than Harry Dresden, since Peter Grant lives in England). They are both involved in solving criminal cases that the police cannot deal with because it's out of their scope of knowledge (though Dresden gets a lot more flak than Grant, mostly because the London police have been working with wizards far longer than the Chicago PD). They both have dark pasts (Grant's not so bad as Dresden's, though to be fair, Dresden has had several books in which to explore his dark past, and Grant has only two so far). And they both have mentors who were (are, in Grant's case) crucial to their development as wizards.

But Aaronovitch's work is no mere copy of Butcher's. True, there are many similarities (some would say too many), but the simple fact that Aaronovitch is a British writer, and Butcher is an American writer, is enough to make Rivers of London quite distinct from any Dresden book. For one, Grant's humor is much drier, more deadpan than Dresden's - typical British humor, I should say. Grant is also somewhat less emotional in his reactions (as he narrates them; since the novel is in first-person it is unknown to the reader how Grant really reacts to anything) than Dresden. Finally, since Grant is with the police, he is able to explain how the police react and work around a wizard, which seems to be somewhere between mild reluctance to outright unwillingness to cooperate; in the Dresden books there is only outright hostility from the police, and even Dresden's usual liaison, Karrin Murphy, doesn't really trust him.

However, whatever else one may say about the similarities (or not) between Grant and Dresden, it must be said that Rivers of London is a great read. The title of the book is based on the fact that, long ago, London had more than one river running through it. The reader is naturally familiar with the Thames, but there are several other, smaller streams and brooks that used to thread through London. The reason why they are no longer seen in the twenty-first century city is that they were built over sometime in the nineteenth-century, to become part of London's sewage system. And then there are, of course, the other tributaries in the countryside north of London, like the Isis (actually part of the Thames itself). In the novel, however, these rivers are embodied by spirits: genii locorum, as they are called. The trouble is that though the Thames used to be ruled in its entirety by Father Thames, he abandoned the lower half of the river during the Great Stink of 1858. As a result, that part of the river was without a spirit - until a young Nigerian woman heard the call of the river and became its spirit, with her daughters becoming the spirits of the tributaries around it. Father Thames, of course, still exists, but mostly to the north, with his sons and their wives acting as the genii locorum of the waterways there. These spirits form some of the most fascinating and important characters in the book, and not just because they are the rivers of London - one of their number, Beverley Brooks (obviously the spirit of the Beverley Brook in London), a daughter of Mother Thames, plays a crucial role in the progression of the storyline.

However, while the rivers themselves are quite important, the storyline involving them is a subplot compared to the other, larger one: the one connected to Punch and Judy. How Aaronovitch gets from a puppet show to a serial killer might be rather confusing, but it is all very deeply rooted in the old mythologies and folklore attached to the concept of Punch and Judy - and a tribute to Aaronovitch's ability to seamlessly weave these together without getting in the way of the story. Recognizing Punch's roots in the Trickster and Lord of Misrule archetypes, Aaronovitch describes Mr. Punch as the spirit of riot and rebellion particular to London: that sensation of "laughter and violence," as Grant describes it, fueling riots and demonstrations in the city. It must be assumed that all cities have just such a spirit embodying those qualities, but in London, it's Mr. Punch - and unfortunately, Mr. Punch has found a willing, ghostly partner with whom to make more mischief and mayhem than usual.

But this story, is, at heart, a mystery, despite all the interesting trappings, and on that level, Rivers of London functions very well. Aaronovitch manages to work a good balance between being informative and leaving things out for later, and never once does the reader feel like he or she is being led around by the nose - or at least not being led around by the nose in a bad way. I suppose the first-person narration helps there, since the reader is learning a lot of facts right alongside Grant, but even when Grant formulates his own theories and reaches his own conclusions, it doesn't feel like he is making very great leaps in connecting one thing to another, or in coming up in with his ideas. This sort of thing is very satisfying on the part of the reader, because never once is he or she made to feel stupid.

Rivers of London is, in many ways, a solid tale. The best books, in my opinion, are the ones that teach us something along the way without making it a chore, and I have learned quite a few things from Aaronovitch's novel. Peter Grant is a solid, reliable (from the reader's perspective) character, and while the novel reaches a satisfying conclusion, there are enough questions still left unanswered to leave the reader hankering for more. Hopefully Aaronovitch continues this wonderful series, because it would be a pity if he does not.