A couple of weeks ago, our Esteemed Editor got an email from A Reader asking if we were going to review City of Glass. Apparently they’d enjoyed my previous reviews of the books, and had felt that they articulated some of their own issues with the series. I can only assume that said reader’s issues with the series had been “this is shit, shit, shit and I want to tear my own eyes out rather than read another page of it” that being roughly the contents of the last two articles.

The reader particularly wanted to hear about City of Glass because their friends had told them that it was much better than the previous two books.

Well, random reader whose name I don’t know, it is and it isn’t.

A few articles back, I expressed the rather controversial opinion that a TV series (and by extension any other series, including books) doesn’t just suddenly get “good” after a couple of volumes or series of being “bad”. Rather it gets more polished, more competent and more sure of itself and therefore improves immeasurably in the eyes of people who were already sold on the basic premise.

I’d like to go further now, and add that one’s perception of the quality of any given work depends not only on the (to use a loaded term) objective merits of that piece of work but also on the context in which that work appears. In my review of Trudi Canavan’s Age of the Five trilogy (sorry, this article is getting really heavy on the self-linkage) I pointed out that I found the series a little disappointing not because it was actually worse than the Black Magician Trilogy but because it wasn’t much better, and I felt I’d already read a lot of the ideas in it before.

I found that City of Glass had the opposite effect. When you get right down to it, it has all the same problems as the previous two books. Clary is still an infuriating self-insert, Jace is still a whiny little prick whose self-destructive urges grow increasingly tedious, and the whole plot still makes virtually no sense at all. On the other hand once you've come this far, you start to take all that pretty much as read, and enjoy the demon-punching shenanigans.

The other factor that left me slightly better disposed towards City of Glass was, ironically enough, the fact that it still read like Harry Potter fanfic. For the first books, this was a weakness, since it invited comparison to the early Potter books, to which The Mortal Instruments compared unfavourably. The same issues in City of Glass invite comparison with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which is a far better light to be standing in.

Indeed there's a lot about City of Glass that reads like an attempt to address common fan criticisms of, and disappointments with, the final volume of the Potter saga.

The point at which the similarities with Harry Potter got too much for me in the first book was the point where I discovered that a scruffy, paternal character who had been a little bit like Remus Lupin was actually a Werewolf and was therefore exactly like Remus Lupin. This turned into one of the saving graces of City of Glass. If nothing else, post Deathly Hallows “contains a character that is similar to Remus Lupin” can not be considered a point of comparison with the Potter books.

Okay, sarcasm aside, one of the big wasted opportunities that fans complain about with Potter is the various “seeking allies amongst the other magical races” arcs (Hagrid's overtures to the giants, Lupin's infiltration of the werewolves, and so on). There was a lot of buildup in the first five books based around the idea that even without Voldemort's influence, Wizarding society had deep-seated inequalities and bigotries which needed to be addressed and a lot of fans were rather annoyed that they weren't. A lot of fans were even more annoyed that the implicit racism of Wizarding society wound up being reduced to a way that the Wizarding elite could display their superiority.

Where was I. Oh yes, Lupin and Clare's Lupin-analogue. One of the seemingly-major subplots in books five and six of the Potter Saga involves fan-favourite Remus Lupin being sent to infiltrate the Werewolves in an effort to make sure that they did not support Voldemort. This lead to many fans making the foolish assumptions that (a) Lupin might actually do something in book seven and (b) that the Wizards might actually have to fight alongside the other races as equals. Of course what they actually got was Lupin marrying a teenager and dropping dead, and the other races fighting for the wizards in a manner that felt distinctly subordinate.

By contrast, pretty much the whole setup of City of Glass is that the Shadowhunters' only hope of victory is to ally themselves with the four races of Downworlders, and to do so in a way that genuinely involves giving the Downworlders greater respect and increased political power. Indeed, even Clary's super-speshul ability to create new runes is suborned into service to this goal, with her great rune-crafting triumph being the creation of the Rune of Alliance, which allows Shadowhunters and Downworlders to share their powers, creating a union that is part vampire, part lycan and stronger than both. Furthermore, this magic rune-crafting only seals the deal, it's Lucian the Lupin-Analogue who orchestrates the alliance, who brings the Downworlders together and introduces them to the Clave. Clary's role is important but ultimately secondary.

Indeed one of the interesting things about the plot of City of Glass is how little – comparatively speaking – it has to do with Clary and her super-specialness. Yes everybody still wants to do her, but in this volume a lot more attention is paid to the fact that ... well ... Valentine has come back and is fucking killing everybody. It ultimately isn't Clary's specialness that defeats Valentine, it's the support of the Downworlders combined with Valentine's own hubris. Set alongside the messianic delusions of Rowling's “protracted plea for tolerance” it seems oddly mature.

It's been over a thousand words now and I've been broadly positive, so as to avoid losing my internet cred entirely I should point out that there are a lot of things in the book that still annoy the hell out of me. There's still the odd what-the-fuck-inducing simile, although none of them stood out as badly as “almost precisely the colour of black ink”. The characterisation is still slightly wobbly. Alex's homosexuality in particular strayed close to what I would consider offensively tokenistic. A certain amount of page-space is given to Alex's relationship with Magnus Bane, with whom he does in fact wind up. The problem is that all of the page-space devoted to their relationship is devoted to them talking about the fact that they're in a relationship, with a side-order of coming-out angst, and no time or thought seems to be put into the question of why these characters are actually attracted to each other, beyond the fact that they are both males of the homosexual persuasion. I'm straying back into Minority Warrior territory here, but it has a nasty whiff of Clare wanting to include a gay character, but not wanting to actually think too hard about the nasty details of two men being a couple.

She also hasn't got over her irritating tendency to show off. As well as eleven out of the twenty chapter titles being pretentious literary allusions (for a full list see the comments section of this article) she keeps dropping in completely pointless psudo-highbrow references for no clear reason. Jace quotes Catullus for no particular purpose other than to show us that Clare has read Catullus, and there's a particularly egregious sequence which unfolds as follows:

Jace smiled. “De ce crezi ca va conversatia”

Sebastian met his glance with a look of pleasant interest. “M-ai urmarit de cand ai ajuns aici,” he replied. “Nu-mi dau seama daca nu ma placi ori daca esti atat de banuitor ce toata lumea.” He got to his feet. “I appreciate the Romanian practice, but if you don't mind, I'm going to see what's taking Isabelle so long in the kitchen.”

Look at meeeee! Look at meeeee everybody! I speak Romanian! Isn't that awesome! Don't you want to have sex with me right now! And I've read Milton! And Rimbaud! And Lawrence! And Euripides! And the Bible! And Wilde! And Pope! Look at meeeeee!

What do you mean you expected something relevant to the story?

Anyway, long story short, if you liked the last two books, you'll probably think this one is, like an orgasm on toast or something. If you didn't like the last two books, you probably won't actually like this one either, but you probably won't want to throw it across the room in anger more than once or twice.