Having written myself out with a review of the prior outing in the Dead Djinn Universe, I will quickly recap: this book is not the peer to The Daevabad Trilogy that I thought it would be. It’s Muslim Miss Marple solving capers in Cairo that happens to be inhabited by djinn and where magic is commonplace.
Caveat I’ve actually never read Miss Marple, I was clearly just going for the alliteration.
Will continue with a conceit that’s worked for me: things I didn’t like. Almost any time that Clark used a short exclamatory sentence, either in Fatma’s third person monologue or when said by a character, it rang false. It’s a phrasing style he utilizes somewhat often, but either the nature of them or the brevity or the directness would pull me out of the action. I think that the book was a bit overlong–it dragged in the middle before picking up steam towards the back half. As the book is meant to serve as a classic whodunit with magic, you can appreciate the artistry of a master whodunner since even I could tell that there were a few red herrings and convenient nerfings for the sake of plot ([was it not IMMEDIATELY obvious that the imposter was able to control djinn and that the librarian wasn’t a random traitor? was it not clear from like, day 2 that it wasn’t going to be Alexander and was probably the lady with the broken hand which was remarked upon every time she entered?]).
With A Dead Djinn in Cairo I talked about how Clark’s work, while not meant as an ambassador for literature featuring practicing Muslims and the Arabic world, nevertheless served as one. I’ll double down on that contention here, even if it does become a bit more heavy handed with the introduction of Hadia the Hijabi Who Will Force You to Challenge Your Assumptions About Muslim Women. Between Fatma and Hadia you have the entire spectrum of believers, and their individual and joint interactions with Siti (and other “idolators,” or followers of the old Egyptian gods) are delightful in their natural exploration of what it means to have faith and be practicing in a “modern” world.
While I’m all about long arcs, I can very much appreciate a novel like this one which ties up the major loose ends and leave the next story waiting in the wings of the world that we have yet to explore. While you would have been lost without reading the earlier novellas, Clark did his part in reminding you of salient details in case it had been a while and you weren’t in the middle of a sprint through all the works. I’ll definitely be picking up all of these as they come out.
It does have an Agatha Christie-ish feel. Clark is playing with the mystery genre format – most notably the “exotic location” mystery. I love that he is using familiar structures and tropes to tell anti-colonist stories in a fantastical alternate universe.
Same!! And as someone of Indian heritage my little bicultural heart sang to hear that India’s djinn (because we also have a long, vibrant Muslim heritage! no matter what you might try and push, Modi!) have helped push the English back to a few outposts.
Amusingly(?) it was one of my small issues with the latter Temeraire books (as in I had much larger plot-and-pacing-based issues)–it felt like most of the large colonial areas from our world had their dragon-based-reasons why they weren’t colonies except India who only had weird second rate dragons 🙁
I haven’t read past the first Temaraire book. I think a lot of fantasy authors, and lets be honest, mostly white fantasy authors, haven’t looked beyond the colonial imperialism that happened. One of the things I love about the slightly increased support for BIPOC authors is that we get books that don’t assume European colonialism is a given. (I do have the City of Brass, but I haven’t read it yet.)
I’ll be interested to see what you think of it!