"You can do magic, Peter ... you can shoot fireballs out of your fingers and your girlfriend is a river. That kind of shit. Like possessed BMWs and just all of it. All of that shit."
"That's different," I said. "That shit is real." [loc. 1955]
Martin Chorley, far from being all but defeated, has a long-term plan that's rooted in London's bloody history and designed to harness the power of gods old and new. There's a great deal here about Roman and Saxon London, which I enjoyed immensely: there's also a plethora of pop-culture references (Lord of the Rings 'films, not books'; The Buried Giant, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Back to the Future ...) and some splendid action sequences set in the less-touristy parts of London (Shoreditch, High Holborn etc).
Things have certainly changed by the end of the novel, and I look forward to reading the next in the sequence. But I also felt that the charm of earlier books was diminished. Oh, there's plenty of magic (spectacular and otherwise) and action and humour; but there is less of Peter's, or the other apprentices', education, and (boo) less Nightingale. There are also errors and typos that should have been caught by an editor (was it the fourth or seventh Earl of Bedford who built St Paul's, Covent Garden?), and rather more loose ends than usual. (Some of these, I think, are references to or are picked up in the graphic novels, which I haven't yet read.) On the whole, a very enjoyable read, but not in my top three novels of the series.
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