I Caught You Young Too

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to wash chlorine out of my hair.

There are things I love about southern California: that I woke up yesterday to a chilly overcast morning, that by 10:00am it was warm enough to swim in my parents’ complex’s outdoor pool, and that it was cool enough all day to never need air-conditioning.

Yesterday I saw Star Trek again after having been thwarted in my quest for a decent swimsuit. (Spock is just as hot, if not hotter, the second time around. Also, I did not realise Zachary Quinto was Sylar from Heroes. Somehow this makes it all more awesome because he is a villain.) What is it with tie-dyed animal print bikinis this season? They are simply the ugliest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Have I missed out on last year’s retro-inspired styles? And do cute-but-sturdy-enough-for-surfing bikinis exist?

In addition to running all over dodge for a non-hideous swimsuit, I found myself searching the length and breadth of Pasadena for Sarah Rees Brennan‘s THE DEMON’S LEXICON, as every bookstore I knew failed to have it on its shelves. On its release day. Bookstore fail.

Nevertheless, I was eventually successful in my quest for the book (if not the bikini) and without further ado:

Review of THE DEMON’S LEXICON by Sarah Rees Brennan

The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

As with Cassandra Clare, Rees Brennan is an author I’ve followed since her days in HARRY POTTER fandom (both authors are friends with each other as well). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: never underestimate the power of fandom. It’s odd to think that the first time I ever read anything by Rees Brennan was almost eight years ago. (It was a Harry/Draco fic called “Underwater Light”, if you must know.) However, unlike Clare, to whose work I’m loyal because I was pretty much obsessed with The Draco Trilogy, I follow Rees Brennan because she’s so goddamned funny.

Here is an debut author with an enormous cult of personality. Long after I ceased to be interested in fanfiction, I continued to read her blog. She continued finishing her fanfiction up until 8 months before her book release, but I actually was less interested in her fanfiction (and not because she wasn’t a good writer) than her life. I’ve followed Rees Brennan’s blog since she left uni in Ireland to serve a publishing internship in New York to getting her M.A. in Writing in England to landing an agent and a book deal. (Almost four years.) In some ways, I feel like I know her really well, even though we don’t know each other at all. She is an author who has sold me on the strength of her personality and wit. So of course I went out and bought her book and read it in one sitting.

In a nutshell, THE DEMON’S LEXICON is about two brothers, Nick and Alan Ryves, on the run from a Circle of magicians hellbent on reclaiming something their deranged mother stole from her old lover Black Arthur, the leader of the Obsidian Circle. When Alan, the elder and caretaker, gets marked for death by a demon whilst helping a pair of siblings, Mae and Jamie, Nick knows he would stop at nothing to heal his brother. Unfortunately, Alan seems to be hindering more than helping Nick in this process, but more importantly, seems to be hiding some very important secrets from his younger brother…

Spoilers to follow.

I was never much for the silently brooding, tall, dark, handsome, and darkly dangerous male lead, or as Rees Brennan calls him, the Angst Muffin. It’s to her credit that Nick (the aforementioned dark and brooding male lead) is my favourite character. This took me entirely by surprise, as I fully expected to fall head-over-heels in love with his brother Alan, a boy with a disarming smile and a limp and a penchant for dead languages, who also happens to be a deadly shot with a gun. (I did fall in love with him, but not until the end, and more on that later.)

Perhaps my attachment to Nick is due to the fact that he is uncomfortable with sentimentality, a trait to which I can wholeheartedly relate. Perhaps it’s because I have been told all my life by Mum, and more recently by Bear, that I can’t hide my emotions very well that I find this admirable. (Again, this goes along with the villain/anti-villain quality I like.) Whatever it was, I found Nick strangely compelling, possibly because he appears to be suffering from antisocial personality disorder and may or may not be a psychopath. I may have mentioned elsewhere that I tend to like my boys bad, and not angsty motorcycle-riding, black-leather-wearing types, but the I-tortured-and-killed-puppies sort. Nick is the latter, but is still an enormously sympathetic protagonist.

Possibly because he’s not one to let passion dictate his actions. Nick is ruthlessly pragmatic (ah, so hot, that!) and even if he doesn’t care about people in general, he is fiercely loyal to his brother Alan. (All my favourite anti-villains have a weakness.) I understand this quite well because I really could give a rat’s arse about strangers. I’m not easily moved to pity, which is why I initially found Alan somewhat annoying. Alan is touchy-feely in a way that makes me manifestly uncomfortable and I’m not talking about his small gestures of affection toward Nick. It’s the way he takes an instant shine to children, puppies, kittens, and apparently-gay blonds named Jamie that irritated me. His attraction to Mae I could understand, even as Nick could, but Alan’s penchant for nurturing helpless and “doomed cases” is something I would find weak in others. (I have no compassion for anything except perhaps baby harp seals and old people.)

This isn’t to say that Alan is two-dimensional or unlikeable. In fact, I can see a lot of people loving him, and I certainly did, especially at the end, when I realised that everything I viewed as weak in him was actually strength. A good writer can turn a character around for me, and Sarah Rees Brennan is certainly that. That all of Alan’s touchy-feely tendencies around Nick were actually hope, hope that his younger brother could learn to return the same affection and love. His extreme kindness and sympathy are for the most part examples he tries to set for Nick. OMG, Alan, I have underestimated you, just as the people in the novel are disarmed by your smiles. (THE DEMON’S LEXICON has a bit of a Sixth Sense thing going on—I went back and reread the book immediately, looking for all the clues that were there.)

Mae and Jamie were likewise strong characters, but this is really a bromance of a sorts and by all rights the novel belongs to Nick and Alan. Jamie I can see as a huge fan favourite; he is blond, gay, and funny and exactly the titchy sort of coward that Rees Brennan would adore and imbue with her own wit and banter. I admit to liking Jamie better than Mae, but this isn’t because Mae herself is weak. It’s just that I have a hard time trusting girls in fiction. I trust Rees Brennan’s heroines, of course, as I believe she and I have similar sensibilities when it comes to female characters. And certainly I like Mae too; I like that she’s confident in herself and her body, that she dyes her hair pink (a colour I’ve always wanted to dye mine), and that she loves her brother enough to die for him. She has none of the Mary-Sue markers and that is always good. But I think when compared to Alan and Jamie, who are both sharply flawed in ways that make them instantly distinguishable, she’s still a tad bit vague for me. But I suspect we’ll be reading more about her in future books (I hope, anyway!).

Rees Brennan is certainly a gifted writer, and while her protagonist is dyslexic, she herself has a way with words. There is a theme running throughout the book about deception, about lies, and about how words can trick you. That is certainly the case with the plot this novel; the words can deceive you, tell you only half-truths until you reach the twist ending and reread the entire book and realise the novel never outright lied. It just…decided to hold back some bits, that’s all.

Nick didn’t lie. He’d seen Alan lie to people his whole life and every time he opened a book he saw words twist across pages, their meaning slipping away from him. Words were treacherous enough without telling him lies.

I think about text and how text can only be a substitution, a cipher, a metaphor for experience. This is something I think about a lot. I wrote my final paper at university about how the Penelope book in James Joyce’s ULYSSES strives to recreate thought processes, which are three-dimensional, while simultaneously trying to call attention to the limitations of text with purposeful typographical errors. (Oh sorry, am I letting my geek show?) I feel Sarah Rees Brennan accomplishes something rather similar, except she isn’t so heavy-handed about words the way Joyce is. (See please: The Oxen of the Sun chapter in ULYSSES.) What do they put in Irish water to breed such literary creativity?

My only real problem with this book is what I feel is the slight thinness of the world-building. So…is the magician Circle/Goblin Market an occult thing (occult as in “hidden”)? If not, then why do Mae and Jamie know so little about demon marks and the like? And if it is occult…do the Goblin Market people try and hide the existence of a magical world from “regular people”? Or is it more of an open secret type thing? Of course, I’m a stickler for the completeness of world-building; other people care less about this than I. (But this may be because I cut my eyeteeth on the fantasy writings of J.R.R. Tolkien.)

So, absolutely and wholeheartedly recommended. Go out and buy Sarah Rees Brennan’s book! And then make sure you have her blog on your readers; I promise you won’t regret it!

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