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The Midnight Mayor- nitpicks
Of course, reading the first book of a series might inform you that someone called Oda isn't necessarily Japanese, even if everyone you've ever met called Oda is. Still, from the reviews I'm glad I didn't read A Madness of Angels, because it sounds like it has the same things I didn't like about The Midnight Mayor, only more of them. Largely a tendency for people to run (*run*) vast distances while in extreme pain and after losing quantities of blood. Adrenalin and (in Mathew's case) testosterone can take you far, but I do wonder if they take you that far. Also the tendency for people to shoot other people, which I can live without. The violence and body damage here rather suggest comic books crossed with H/C fanfic. Could have done with more atmosphere and rather less blood, myself.
Of course, I read it with my map of London spread wide, the one I bought for Moon over Soho. Didn't help me with the outlying areas like Ealing and Hounslow. I need a map of the *boroughs* of London, all of them.
Mhh and also-- all this 'eight million people on two thousand years of history, what enchantments and power they build up, sinking into the stones themselves!' talk. Yes, I do go on myself about how the past builds up in London and fantods me more than a little; but Griffin is more about the cumulative effect of Londoners, living and dead, than history. So why do the 13 million people in Tokyo (35 million in the greater urban area) not have the same effect? As urban areas go, London is pretty far down the list.
Of course, I read it with my map of London spread wide, the one I bought for Moon over Soho. Didn't help me with the outlying areas like Ealing and Hounslow. I need a map of the *boroughs* of London, all of them.
Mhh and also-- all this 'eight million people on two thousand years of history, what enchantments and power they build up, sinking into the stones themselves!' talk. Yes, I do go on myself about how the past builds up in London and fantods me more than a little; but Griffin is more about the cumulative effect of Londoners, living and dead, than history. So why do the 13 million people in Tokyo (35 million in the greater urban area) not have the same effect? As urban areas go, London is pretty far down the list.
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I doubt the Tokyo sorcerers are picking up on anything 17th century still; there's very little of it left, unlike London. (A place where streets don't have names is going to absorb less past, by me. If it burns, it's gone, and Tokyo burns a lot.) But if they can do anything with electricity and fluorescent, they're gold. Only I'm sure it's very well-behaved electricity, unlike the blue angels.
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... now that I write this I wonder if something of the same spirit as American Gods might've done better set in a country where the "native gods" and folklore are actually still going strong. Obviously I'm thinking East Asia, but there's got to be 100 other examples.
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If I understand Griffin's system correctly, modern urban magic rises out of people living their human lives in a place and the emotions and reflexes that accrue therefrom. I'm not sure Shinto or Buddhism would get much of a look-in in Japan, given how skin-deep and automatic those seem to most Japanese. (Much less the old folktale figures-- kappa show up in advertisements for sake these days, not in Tokyo canals.) It's like Gaiman's Minnesotans with no notion of what Easter's all about, though I think Gaiman is seriously underestimating the hold of religion in middle America.
But her system *would* work in Tokyo rather well. Matthew's spell to stop enemies boarding the Tube has the Japanese equivalent of pronouncing the words 'Charging the doors is dangerous, please stop' which would indeed halt any Japanese in his tracks. Or even better, the famous mantra 'Kiken desu kara, kiiroi sen no uchigawa e o-sagari kudasai' which accompanies the arrival of every flipping train in Tokyo; say that with intent and no one can move from behind the yellow lines. We won't even talk about the energies of pachinko parlours and street crossing tunes.
I suppose Gaiman's point is that there's no place for the divine numinous in America, because the popular culture provides a sufficiently satisfactory ersatz substitute. The war's already been lost. Maybe in Indonesia the war's still going; a version of American Gods set in Singapore would be interesting, but a version of A Madness of Angels would be better still.
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How set in stone/subject to rules and derivations is Griffin's system anyway? It seems much more, erm, handwaved than for example Aaronovitch's, with Sir Isaac Newton and all. I really appreciate the Peter Grant Magical School, I should say XD I like my fantasies to have rules!
I very much want to write (or read, I'm lazy) an urban magic novel set in modern Mainland China, haha, one of these days I might even get around to it. >_>
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A million people doing different things on a train doesn't give you a spell; a million people all feeling abandoned while they ride gives you The Lonely Traveller.
That last is the effect of BritRail and by extension, I suppose, any other train in London. By god does one feel abandoned on a British train. Hence there can be no Lonely Travellers in Tokyo, where the trains and the staff all coddle you like a mother. Unless there's a paradigmatic Lonely Traveller that all Japanese are happy they aren't.
I think the glory of Griffin is that her system can't be set in stone. Life is far too inchoate, individuated and messy to be a stable basis; hence the handwavium feel. Newton's principles are so much of that century: the ordered and measurable universe obeying eternal laws, and so in Aaronovitch, magic does too. It could easily go dry-as-dust, except for those unregulated river deities and a certain lawful chaos aspect to Peter himself.
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As for Aaronovitch, I think I figure that since the real and extremely messy universe comes out of the laws of nature, and we're not even close to being done trying to quantify them all, I'm okay with that system :D
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ANYWAY. I don't know if you read Chinese, but if you do, there exist PRC urban magic stories written and available on websites;
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Alas, no, my Chinese is less than basic, and not up to reading beautifully written stories. If you ever had time to translate even parts, some of us would be very grateful.
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oh right AND Re: warning for ramblin'
Although none of them are the type who would have studied the Bible in the scholarly sense, either in Seminary or College/University, so there's huge swaths of room for people not realizing how many traditions Christianity has co-opted.