Bartimaeus 2 – The Golem’s Eye

Jonathan Stroud's The Golem's Eye is the second Bartimaeus book, a sharp and very funny fantasy for 11 year olds set in a London run by magicians.

What happens

It opens in Prague, in 1868, with a British army camped outside the walls. Bartimaeus is a djinni who built those walls three hundred years earlier. He is flying over them at dusk, exhausted, working out how long the city has left.

He finds the sentries hiding behind a shield that only fits three of them, squabbling. One is a small mournful frog. The frog asks whether they are all going to die by morning, and Bartimaeus tries a rousing speech, which goes badly.

Then London, and Nathaniel, who is fourteen and going by the name John Mandrake at work.

He has an office, a secretary who resents him, a long black coat he is very pleased with, and a job. The government has handed him the Resistance, a group of commoners who steal magical objects and throw them back at the magicians. Nobody has caught them in three years. Nathaniel has promised he will do it in six months.

On the other side is Kitty, a girl he met once in the dark years ago, who took his scrying glass and nearly killed him.

Then a clay golem starts attacking the city, and neither of them has any idea where it came from.

What makes these books so good is who is telling them. Bartimaeus narrates his own chapters himself and he is rude about absolutely everybody, including you, the person reading. He adds little footnotes at the bottom of the page to correct himself, boast, or point out that there is probably something invisible with tentacles behind you right now.

Nathaniel's chapters are colder. You watch him flick a coin to a fruit seller, take an orange off the top of her tray, and walk on without a word. He's clever and he's hungry and he's turning into somebody you're not sure you like, and the book knows that.

A note on how dark it is. The book opens on a city being sacked, with houses burning and people fleeing in the streets, and a magician dies in an explosion on the page. Away from that, people are executed, deported, and one informer turns up dead in the Thames, all reported in the same dry, unbothered voice. It is never gory, but the coolness is the point and some readers find that colder than gore.

What to read next

Start with The Amulet of Samarkand if you can. It opens with a scared twelve-year-old summoning something far too big for him and trying to sound in charge about it, and the joke of these books runs from that first page.