An honest man in Parliament

Paul Cornell's follow up to London Falling is one wild ride with a few surprises I wasn't expecting.

The Severed Streets brings us back to Quill, Costain, Sefton, and Ross (and in a more prominent role, their direct supervisor, Lofthouse), the detectives who have the "Sight", the ability to see quite a bit more of London than the average person. Things like demons, hell, spectres... you know, the invisible things trying very hard to kill everyone. At the end of the last book, we found out bits and pieces of an organization not there anymore that helped police the supernatural world, and were lead to assume that the fab 4 here (and Lofthouse) might become that group again.

Which doesn't exactly happen in this book. We do get some new concepts (the last book focused on "Remembering", this book focuses on "Ostentation"), we also get what I thought was a cameo by Neil Gaimen, who instead turns into a fairly major supporting player. (We'll come back to that here in a minute.)

The books opens with the British equivalent of Anonymous here in the States (in here, Toffs... I'm kind of wondering about the Toff masks, since Anonymous here wear Guy Fawkes masks. I'm curious what the Brits would wear... Nixon masks?) protesting outside Parliament While a Liberal Democrat MP tries to get through the crowd. We get a bit of his thoughts on compromise with the Tories (I had to look up a bit about them, since Tory here in the states usually connects with the Loyalists who didn't support the Revolutionaries), and then our PM encounters a Toff who somehow manages to get in the car without opening the door. Said Toff proceeds to butcher the MP in the backseat while the chauffeur sees about what Rod saw in the original Nightmare on Elm Street when Tina dies. (Which is to say, seeing the murder, but not the entity doing the murdering.)

This of course leads to Quill's team getting involved, which is made more difficult by rising austerity measures and cuts to public funding starting talk of a Police strike.

We find out Lofthouse knows some of what's going on, but doesn't have the Sight. She does, however, have a key charm on her bracelet that's implied to have something to do with her knowledge.

Quill's team's investigation takes them to a gathering of the Sighted, which reveals a split among interested parties. Seems two young bucks on the block (The Keel Brothers) are working on opening up the occult community to more people, and getting rid of the barter system in favor of money. (IE buying an object for Pounds sterling instead of a pint of blood.) It's here that Gaimen makes his first appearance, talking about how he was given the Sight by a fan.

Gaimen appears a few more times, explaining Ostentation (the idea that things have their own momentum... like protests getting bigger because of one or two Twitter posts entering the collective unconscious of the Toffs) and pointing out how his sight lead to the huge difference between the original BBC Neverwhere and the book that followed. (And if you haven't read the book, go do so now. I'll wait.)

Anyway, as the killer strikes a few more times, it gets wrapped into Jack the Ripper mythology (Without spoiling anything, Cornell does reveal his pick for the real Ripper in later chapters.), only this ripper strikes at rich white men.

The last third of the book plays around with time to a very large degree, as chapters go back a day or two at a time, revealing bits of story that need unveiled slowly.

We get much character development in here, from Ross (the only female on the team trying to find a way to free her father from Hell), to Costain (trying to find a way to avoid Hell), to Sefton (gay, and dating a nice, normal man), to Quill (who's wife's newspaper gets bought by a Rupert Murdoch type magnate. Or Randolph Hurst. More Murdoch though. His back story is very similar.) We also get a new character, The Rat King, who finds things lost in London who takes a bit of a shine to Sefton.

A few notes here: This setting is kind of like Lovecraft writing Narnia books. You can tell Gaimen influenced the writing here, and a note at the end does acknowledge Gaimen's approval. (Which is good, since Gaimen the character is kind of shady in a few spots.) Also, even though The Smiling Man (a shadowy antagonist from the first book) is in here, he's even more in the background in this one. He's quite a bit like the Cigarette Smoking Man on The X Files. 

Really good read, and much more cohesive than the last book.

We're short an insane man in a blue box.

I'm really at a loss on how to explain London Falling by Paul Cornell. It's got quite a bit in common with Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, only much darker. Well, maybe not darker, just...grittier. And lacking in the humor inherent in Gaiman.

We start with two undercover cops, Sefton and Costain, on the last night of an 4 year long sting trying to nick Rob Toshack, sort of the Godfather of London. The two UCs are supervised by Quill, who's suspicious of Costain, since Costain seems to be breaking the first rule of undercover and doing the drugs he's "selling". And processing information on the case in the background is Ross, who we find out is Toshack's niece.

They do manage to arrest Toshack, not long after Costain (while wearing a recording device), manages to out himself and Sefton as UCs. Sefton, in the meantime thinks Costain has it out for him because Sefton is gay. Sefton, in the meantime, goes out of his way to get Costain in trouble as everyone gets rounded up.

Toshack goes quietly, and confesses to everything while being interrogated by Quill. At which point Toshack explodes into a big bloody mess. For no apparent reason.

This sets up thr thrust of the book, wherein the four principles investigate a soil sample found at one of the residences Toshack spent the night before the arrest visiting, only to be gifted with "The Sight". Which manifests itself in such ways as Quill finding his best buddy is being tormented by his Dad's ghost.

As Operation Toto proceeds (and the 4 coppers try to deal with the new gift), we find the chief suspect in Toshack's death is one Mora Losley, who had a season ticket next to Toshack at the West Ham Irons football team. (Football in the case meaning soccer. Since Europeans and Africans have no idea what real football is. Amurika! Heck yeah!) Mora, they figure out, seems to be in the habit of using the bloody explosion trick on anyone who scores a hat trick on her beloved Irons. Of course, they also find out the way to make people explode in blood is to boil three children alive. (Mora really needed a gingerbread house. Of course, given her familiar, she could just have easily lived in a hut dancing on chicken legs.)

As the story progresses, we get insight into all four of our protagonists and their various relationships, and, thanks to the aforementioned familiar, we also get to know Mora's history. Which makes her much more of a sympathetic character. Well, other than that whole boiling children in a big pot to kill people who score three points against a team playing a sport no one cares about.

In this, the first book of what will probably become a series (I say that, since the extradimensional entity Mora works for remains quite enigmatic through the end), we get several themes in what forms the metaphysics of Cornell's world building. Among other things, none of the wonderful abilities work outside London, and one of the running issues is what actual borders London has. Pretty sure the definition used in this is the outerbelt that forms the sigil for the Black hand of Mu, or whatever that joke was in Good Omens. What's true is less important than what's remembered when it comes to the setting.

Also, there is a very strong thread of isolation wrapped around almost every character in the novel.  And interestingly, it's the characters' isolation that eventually binds them together. Even if they do more or less form a standard Dungeons & Dragons adventure group in terms of roles within their cell.

I look forward to whatever followup Cornell eventually releases.