Published: 2004
Rating: ★★★
What is an ‘English’ magician? A fun question, and this novel starts as a fun exploration of that. Formal and controlled magic appears to be the answer, rather than spirited and wild. The writing is historical tongue in cheek, and copious footnotes add to the sense of this being a formal historical account. So far so good, but before long the tale get bogged down in fairly tiresome and irrelevant side stories.
Particularly irksome were the many times both magicians had the answer to unlocking the tangle dangled before them and chose instead to pursue another side quest of little consequence. So many delays in getting to the core of the story become frustrating, so much so that I was skimming paragraphs waiting to get to the final third.
At which point—or rather, the final quarter—the book picks up dramatically as the threads are finally drawn together. Real English magic starts to appear, and creatures of wonder and myth, and everything is so much better for it. As would the novel have been if it were half the length, distilling the good and excising the meandering.