Bartimaeus 4 – The Ring of Solomon

Jonathan Stroud's The Ring of Solomon is a fantasy for 11 year olds narrated by a five-thousand-year-old djinni who thinks the world of himself.

What happens

Bartimaeus is a spirit, summoned out of his own dimension and bound to obey whichever magician says the right words. Right now that is a one-eyed old man in Jerusalem who keeps a wax cylinder and scratches a black mark on it every time Bartimaeus is cheeky. The cylinder is filling up.

The year is 950 BC. King Solomon wants treasures, so every magician in the city is sending something horrible out into the night to fetch one. Bartimaeus gets the dead city of Eridu, where the guardians are mummified corpses and the temple traps have had fifteen hundred years to go wrong.

He is very funny about all of it. The corpses shuffle at him and he complains that none of them have any decent one-liners.

Then he does something clever and appalling to get out from under his master, and it works far too well. He ends up handed over to Khaba, an Egyptian magician whose shadow trails behind him like a cloak and who has been told to bring him to heel.

Above all of them sits Solomon, in gold and kohl and silk, with one plain ring on his little finger. Nobody will look at it. When he turns it, the room goes dark.

The pleasure of reading this is the narrator. Bartimaeus takes any shape he likes and mostly picks one that will annoy somebody. He interrupts himself constantly with footnotes, which are the best jokes in the book and also the place he keeps his grudges. Some readers adore that. Some find it keeps pulling them out of the scene.

One thing to know before you hand it over. The comedy is cheerfully gory. Bodies come apart. A head is used as a projectile. The dead in the temple are described in loving detail, and the moment that changes everything for Bartimaeus is a death he engineers on purpose and then makes a joke about. It is all pitched as slapstick, never as horror, but there is a lot of it, and a reader who does not like violence played for laughs will notice.

For a reader who does, it is properly clever. The court politics are real politics, the magic has rules, and the joke is always that the most powerful thing in the room is the one taking orders.

This is the fourth book by publication, but it stands on its own. It is set thousands of years before the others, with its own cast and its own explanation of how magicians and spirits work, so your reader can start here.

What to read next

If they want the London end of it, The Amulet of Samarkand is where the trilogy begins. A boy apprentice summons Bartimaeus in a peeling back room and sends him to steal something from a magician far out of his league.