Bartimaeus 1 – The Amulet of Samarkand

Jonathan Stroud's The Amulet of Samarkand is a sharp, very funny fantasy for 11 year olds, and half of it is narrated by a djinni with a grudge.

What happens

A boy who looks about twelve stands in a chalk circle in a grotty London town house and summons something enormous. He is shaking. His teeth rattle. He has obviously been planning this for years.

What he summons is Bartimaeus, who rebuilt the walls of Uruk and Karnak and Prague, who has spoken with Solomon, and who is extremely put out at taking orders from a scrawny kid.

The boy's instruction is short and completely mad. Go into the house of Simon Lovelace, a powerful and vicious magician, and steal the Amulet of Samarkand.

So that is what Bartimaeus does. As a blackbird, then a mole, then a fly, then a boy, past three yellow sentries and a spy dressed up as a smoke alarm.

He tells his half in the first person and he is hilarious. He brags. He sulks. He complains that his feathers ache and that he hates the taste of mud. He also drops footnotes along the bottom of the page, and the footnotes are usually where the best jokes are hiding.

The boy's half is told quite differently, in the third person, and it is much colder. His master teaches him that demons are wicked by sending him into a study containing a hundred of them at the age of six. He is carried out. He does not eat for a day and does not speak for a week.

That is the shape of the whole thing. Everybody is using everybody. The magicians run Britain, they are horrible to each other and worse to their apprentices, and Bartimaeus is nobody's friend, including yours.

Some of it is genuinely cruel and some of it is played for laughs on the same page, which is an odd mix if your reader likes their goodies good. There is a corridor fight with things detonating, and a spy crushed to the size of a marble.

A small thing to know before you hand it over. Bartimaeus mentions, in a footnote, that he can take the shape of a woman and plans to turn up naked to embarrass the boy. It is one line and nothing comes of it in this stretch of the book, but it is the sort of line a parent would rather hear about first.

If your reader wants a fantasy where the clever narrator is not remotely a hero, send them straight here. If they want somebody to root for, this is not that book.

What to read next

The Golem's Eye comes next and takes Bartimaeus to Prague, after a clay golem starts making attacks on London that nothing seems able to stop.