Sabriel – Garth Nix

What happens

On one side of a kind of occult Berlin Wall is the Old Country, a kingdom run on standard fantasy-fiction feudal lines. In the Old Kingdom, magic works: the kingdom is founded on the Charter, a kind of magical pact that lets adepts use the source code of the universe to make things happen. And mages that don’t adhere to the Charter, but use Free Magic, are bad and naughty and forever raising the dead. So, to protect the world, one wizard is able to use both – the Abhorsen. It’s his or her job to chase zombies back to the land of the dead, stop necromancers from raising more, and generally keep the peace between life and death.

On the other side of the wall lies Ancelstierre. The country feels rather like a version of 1940’s or ’50s Britain, with jolly hockey sticks public schools, primitive cars and telephones with actual operators. Enter teenage Sabriel, daughter of the Abhorsen. She’s been raised in Ancelstierre, doesn’t know that much about the Old Country, but has learned a bit of Abhorsen-ing from her dad while at boarding school. But now dad has disappeared, so she heads off to look for him. In the process she runs away from a lot of zombies, inherits a splendid castle on an island, gets jiggy with a chap who turns out to be the lost member of the royal family, and (naturally) ends up saving the world.

What I liked

It’s pacy and well-written. It’s a kids’ book really, aimed (at a guess) at 12-year-olds; but as the storyline is essentially one long chase scene the story gallops along, with poor Sabriel hounded along by one monster or another from beyond the grave. It’s not a challenging read, but it’s still enjoyable enough, and many of the landscapes and in-world mythology (especially the bells that are used to command the dead) are vividly imagined and stick in the mind.

What I didn’t like

Some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional, and I thought staging the showdown in a school was naff. But I’m not the intended teenage audience, so perhaps that’s unfair. Sometimes I found myself wishing that the moral line between goodies and baddies wasn’t quite so clear-cut, that there was a teeny bit more ambiguity in characters’ motivations.

Why you might want to read this on the train

You’re tired, hung over or overworked, and want an unchallenging but absorbing, pacy and well-imagined fantasy thriller with a happy ending to distract you from the horrifying fact that it’s Monday again.

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Posted: February 21st, 2010 | Author: bookworm | Filed under: Fantasy, YA | No Comments »