Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green
Jul. 17th, 2007 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
The name's John Taylor. I work the garish streets of the Nightside - the hidden heart of London where it's always three a.m., where inhuman creatures and otherworldly gods walk side by side in the endless darkness of the soul.
I have a talent for finding things. People ... property ... no problem. But now I'm after something different.
A local diva called the Nightingale has cut herself off from her family and friends, and I've been hired to find out the reason. I'm also wondering why her suicide-prone fans think she has a voice to die for. Literally.
To get to the truth, I'll have to lend an ear to the most enticingly beautiful and deadly voice in all of the Nightside - and survive.
There's not a lot that I can say about this book that I haven't already said about the characters and set up in my review of Agent’s of Light and Darkness.
I'm a little confused as to how Taylor's gift for finding things works because it seems to go beyond merely locating something and being to influence what is found. At times this is a little too convenient in terms of getting the character out of trouble and worryingly, it makes him to apparently invincible for the perilous situations to seem, well ... perilous.
Taylor's hired to find out what's going on with the Nightingale by her father and is joined by Deadboy, a teenager who was murdered for his mobile phone and who made a deal with Someone to return to his body and take revenge on his killers. Unfortunately, he didn't read the small print, which is why he's stuck in a body that can take a lot of punishment without ever dying. I quite liked the character - his search for new sensation and the dark humour he displays. I also enjoyed the return of Alex the bartender and the introduction of Julien Cavendish, a newspaper editor and Victorian hero, but I'm not wild about Cathy, Taylor's secretary who seems too unbelievably up and confident given what happened to her in Something From The Nightside.
Structurally, I thought the first chapter regarding strange events at Prometheus Inc. was very poor. It's almost all exposition and there's no mystery to what's happened. In fact, it only seems to be there in order to give Taylor an excuse to avoid Walker, who is unhappy with the way the case turns out (i.e. rolling blackouts across the Nightside) and it certainly does nothing to flesh out Taylor's character. The Nightingale mystery itself is enjoyable but predictable - Green seems to believe in handholding the reader through all the developments and whilst he writes in an entertaining way, there are times when I yearned for some depth to the narrative and the character descriptions. In particular, as you read the books it becomes easy to spot the cut-and-paste descriptions - literally the same words get used again and again to describe locations or characters and whilst that could be excused as a way of trying to provide an easy aide memoir, I'm more inclined to see it as laziness. There are some good set-pieces - in particular the chapter set in Divas! and Green packs his text with a lot of interesting ideas. He also weaves more of Taylor's backstory into the text, which keeps the overrarching story going and I'm interested in finding out what's happening with Lilith.
The Verdict:
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not particularly deep. I dislike the cut-and-paste repetition of description which Green brings to the book and even for a book of only 200+ pages, the story is slight. But as always, it's entertaining and an okay way of passing a couple of hours.
The name's John Taylor. I work the garish streets of the Nightside - the hidden heart of London where it's always three a.m., where inhuman creatures and otherworldly gods walk side by side in the endless darkness of the soul.
I have a talent for finding things. People ... property ... no problem. But now I'm after something different.
A local diva called the Nightingale has cut herself off from her family and friends, and I've been hired to find out the reason. I'm also wondering why her suicide-prone fans think she has a voice to die for. Literally.
To get to the truth, I'll have to lend an ear to the most enticingly beautiful and deadly voice in all of the Nightside - and survive.
There's not a lot that I can say about this book that I haven't already said about the characters and set up in my review of Agent’s of Light and Darkness.
I'm a little confused as to how Taylor's gift for finding things works because it seems to go beyond merely locating something and being to influence what is found. At times this is a little too convenient in terms of getting the character out of trouble and worryingly, it makes him to apparently invincible for the perilous situations to seem, well ... perilous.
Taylor's hired to find out what's going on with the Nightingale by her father and is joined by Deadboy, a teenager who was murdered for his mobile phone and who made a deal with Someone to return to his body and take revenge on his killers. Unfortunately, he didn't read the small print, which is why he's stuck in a body that can take a lot of punishment without ever dying. I quite liked the character - his search for new sensation and the dark humour he displays. I also enjoyed the return of Alex the bartender and the introduction of Julien Cavendish, a newspaper editor and Victorian hero, but I'm not wild about Cathy, Taylor's secretary who seems too unbelievably up and confident given what happened to her in Something From The Nightside.
Structurally, I thought the first chapter regarding strange events at Prometheus Inc. was very poor. It's almost all exposition and there's no mystery to what's happened. In fact, it only seems to be there in order to give Taylor an excuse to avoid Walker, who is unhappy with the way the case turns out (i.e. rolling blackouts across the Nightside) and it certainly does nothing to flesh out Taylor's character. The Nightingale mystery itself is enjoyable but predictable - Green seems to believe in handholding the reader through all the developments and whilst he writes in an entertaining way, there are times when I yearned for some depth to the narrative and the character descriptions. In particular, as you read the books it becomes easy to spot the cut-and-paste descriptions - literally the same words get used again and again to describe locations or characters and whilst that could be excused as a way of trying to provide an easy aide memoir, I'm more inclined to see it as laziness. There are some good set-pieces - in particular the chapter set in Divas! and Green packs his text with a lot of interesting ideas. He also weaves more of Taylor's backstory into the text, which keeps the overrarching story going and I'm interested in finding out what's happening with Lilith.
The Verdict:
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not particularly deep. I dislike the cut-and-paste repetition of description which Green brings to the book and even for a book of only 200+ pages, the story is slight. But as always, it's entertaining and an okay way of passing a couple of hours.
