Reading Cassandra Clare is, for me, like visiting an old friend. An old friend who is kind of a dick. An old friend who is kind of a dick, but who you are comfortable enough around that you accept their being a dick as part of the charm of their personality, and then after you get home ask yourself why the hell you were ever friends with that dick.

So yes. Cassandra Clare.

The Infernal Devices trilogy is a prequel to the Mortal Instruments trilogy, set in the same world, but in Victorian Times. Being Victorian Times means it is set in London, which is where the Victorian Times happened, and there are clockwork automatons, which is what the economy of the Victorian Times was based on.

The heroine of the prequel trilogy is an American Girl named Tessa Gray who has had to come to England to live with her brother. The hero of the prequel trilogy is Fanon Draco, as always. This version of Fanon Draco is called William Herondale. He is a sarcastic, emotionally withdrawn young man who has difficulty trusting people. He is not to be confused with Jace from The Mortal Instruments who was a sarcastic, emotionally withdrawn young man with different coloured hair.

I'm going to start by saying how much I love the name “William Herondale”. It just sounds so perfectly like what it is – a name invented by an American girl to sound really English to other American girls who have never been to England. The whole book is kind of like this – it feels a great deal like the cast of the original trilogy decided to cosplay as Victorians (and the cover of the UK edition looks rather like that as well – I've never seen somebody look less comfortable in a top hat).

The book opens with a nine page prologue, but the action of the prologue takes place directly before the action of the first chapter, so I really don't understand what makes it a “prologue” and not “chapter one”. Anyway the prologue delighted me by including the two things I've come to demand from the works of Cassie Clare, the first being incredibly ill-constructed similes:

Through the gap, Will could see the dark outlines of docked ships, a forest of masts like a leafless orchard.

It's not quite “the colour of black ink” but there's a certain peculiar genius to it. You can almost imagine her sitting at her keyboard and thinking “hmm, there's this forest of masts, but I need a striking visual metaphor to describe it, what would it be like … I know, a forest of masts would look like an orchard.”

And the second, of course, being an infeasibly hot badboy love interest:

Will smiled the way Lucifer might have smiled, moments before he fell from heaven.

As I so often say in these situations, part of me appreciates the sheer brass (and presumably in this case steam-powered) bollocks of it. Remember that this line appears on page twelve of the UK edition, and the prologue only starts on page seven. I'd say that she might as well have just written “and by the way, Will was really, really, really hot” but she actually does that as well a mere thirty pages later:

He had the most beautiful face she had ever seen. Tangled black hair and eyes like blue glass. Elegant cheekbones, a full mouth, and long, thick lashes. Even the curve of his throat was perfect.

I mean, it's nice that she puts her cards on the table, but seriously, we are on page forty-two here. I don't think I'd mind so much if it weren't for the fact that they don't even get together in this book – they kiss like, twice, and he makes inappropriate suggestions (because he is tormented) and that's it. I know it's the nineteenth century, but nobody in the entire book offers more than a passing nod to a period-appropriate worldview – at least TMI had the whole incest arc keeping the leads from hopping into bed with each other, all that stops the protagonists of this book from jumping in the sack is recycled Draco-angst and the fact that Tessa very, very occasionally remembers it's supposed to be 1878.

Anyway, the story of Clockwork Angel (spoilers follow) is that Tessa Gray is summoned to England, where it turns out she has shapeshifting powers, which she is abused into revealing by two scary old ladies called the Dark Sisters (I shit you not) who want to force her to marry somebody called “the Magister” (I still shit you not). She is rescued by Draco Jace William Herondale and the other Shadowhunters, who are investigating the Dark Sisters and the mysterious “Pandemonium Club” that they work for and the sinister “Magister” who runs it. Investigation ensues, and it turns out that the Pandemonium Club are building a clockwork army to wipe out the Shadowhunters. The Shadowhunters try to take down the Magister, but it turns out they have been tricked by the real Magister into taking down the wrong villain. The identity of the true Magister is kind of obvious (clue, all Cassie Clare's villains have surnames beginning with “M”) but the reveal is reasonably well handled and while you can see the twist coming a mile off, the clues are mostly metatextual so the protagonists don't look too stupid.

Because it's the first book in a trilogy, of course, the book ends with a completely inconclusive confrontation, and a metric assload of foreshadowing during which nothing whatsoever is revealed about anything at all.

I'm sort of torn about the plot. I found the opening dull, was quite excited at the bit in the middle where they killed a bunch of vampires, was pleased with the revelation of the real Magister but then realised that (a) nothing was going to get explained at all and (b) there were still two chapters to go, which presumably would consist of nothing but setup and foreshadowing. I did provisionally like the Magister arc, which begins with the Shadowhunters being all dismissive and superior about mortals who dabble in the occult, and ends with the revelation that the Magister actually is an ordinary mortal who – it seems – has managed to achieve power in the world of the supernatural by being legitimately smarter than everybody else (which admittedly isn't particularly hard, Clare's secondary creation isn't exactly overflowing with competence).

Of course this touches on one of my perennial beefs with Urban Fantasy, which is its complete lack of interest in anybody who isn't touched by the Special Magic Fairy Dust. Long-time fans of my struggles with the good Ms Clare might remember that I felt that City of Glass was in part an attempt to “do right” some of the unfollowed plot threads in the later Potter books (specifically, any and all threads that related to Wizarding society being hella fucked up), in City of Glass the Clave really does have to make concessions to the Downworlders in order to defeat Valentine, and they (to some extent) have to confront some nasty truths about their society. Clockwork Angel seems (although I am more than ready to be disappointed on this count) to be making a similar attempt to address the Wizarding World's treatment of Muggles (and more generally, the treatment of mundane humans in urban fantasy as a genre). It's relatively clear throughout the book that the Shadowhunters have a really screwed-up attitude to mundanes, and part of the reason the twist works so well (despite being relatively obvious) is that you can absolutely see why they fall for it – it's clearly impossible for any of them to believe that they could be so utterly played by an ordinary human.

This does have a downside, however, which is that it leaves some parts of the audience (at least, those parts of the audience which are me) kind of rooting for the villain. Perhaps I'm just an asshole, but Clare does such a good job of making the Shadowhunters look like patronising douchebags that I could see a lot of sense in Operation Robot Army. Certainly I'd rather put my faith in a bunch of killer machines than in a group of invisible ninja wizards who think they're better than me. Of course the problem with this is that the guy is inevitably going to lose, which means that whatever Clare's intentions, it seems likely that the overall message of the series is going to wind up being “and remember, don't try to move outside of the sphere you were born into.” Like always.

As always when reviewing long running series by the same author, I find myself running out of steam around this point because, well, there isn't a lot I can say here that will be a surprise to anybody. I can I think say that Cassie Claire is getting less bad, although as always it might just be that I'm growing accustomed to her idiosyncrasies. For example, I didn't find the chapter titles quite as infuriating this time around – none of them were in Latin, most of them were short and descriptive, and only three or four of them contain the words “Heaven”, “Angel” or “Darkness”. Chapter two does reach a new low by being called “Hell is Cold” - a title which is justified solely by the fact that Tessa randomly tells Will (in the middle of an escape scene, no less) that “Hell is Cold” because the lowest levels of hell are full of ice in The Inferno. Which she has read. And which Cassie Clare has also read.

Oh yes, about that. While Ms Clare has very slightly restrained her urge to pack literary references into her chapter titles, she has more than compensated in two ways. Firstly, she continues her tradition of having her protagonists quote stuff all the damned time (this gets circular fast – frequently chapter titles are references to the fact that characters in the book quote a particular line in the chapter – as with “Hell is Cold” in chapter two). Secondly she opens each chapter with a quote from a poem. Poems which she helpfully informs us (in an author's note after the text – much like you might get in an H/D songfic) were all poems that Tessa would have known about, except for the bits that aren't – there's Wilde and Kipling in there despite the book being set in 1878. I wouldn't have minded this so much, but the Author's Note makes quite a big deal about how the rest of the poems are texts Tessa would have been familiar with, and I kind of think that if you're going to do a thing, you should do it properly, otherwise it looks a lot like you've just taken a bunch of random poems from some time vaguely in the past.

The book opens, incidentally with a full length poem called “Thames River Song” which was actually written especially for the book by a third party (one Elka Cloke, you can apparently find a full version of the poem at www.elkacloke.com). This poem is clearly supposed to be about the Thames as it was in the Age of Steam, and – I don't know – I think if you want a poem about the Thames in the nineteenth century you should go with a nineteenth-century poet. I can't help but suspect that the reason she didn't pick, say, Lines Written Near Richmond, Upon the Thames, at Evening or Steam-Launches on the Thames is because they didn't contain enough references to cogs, steam, machinery and all the other things that people who have never been to London associate with it.

I vaguely promised myself that this wouldn't turn into a rant about Steampunk, I've mellowed a lot on the (sub)genre over the years, and I'm happy to accept that good books can be and have been written in a steampunk mode. That said, a lot of things still hack me off about the subculture, one of which is its peculiar insistence that the Industrial Revolution was all about individual craftsmen building wonderful machines when in fact it was about masses of people in factories producing stuff in bulk. To put it another way, real Victorian poets didn't write about their world like this:

Each tiny golden cog has teeth,
each great wheel moves
a pair of hands which take
the water from the river,
devour it, convert it into steam,
coerce the great machine to run
on the force of its dissolution.

This is because people in the nineteenth century didn't give a crap about cogs and brass and steam any more than, well, twenty-first century people do (after all the vast majority of electricity is still generated in thermal power stations, which still use steam-driven turbines and which still contain cogs and gears and all of those other oldey-timey sounding things which are part of pretty much any mechanical device you might care to name). Real historical poets who lived in the real London wrote about real people who lived in a real city. William Blake's London for example, begins:

I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Wordsworth, in London, 1802 writes:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Sorry, I've spent a really insanely long time banging on about this, but you might notice that neither of those poems contain any reference to brass, steam, lenses, goggles or any of the other steampunk nonsense that Clare felt was such a necessary part of her evocation of my goddamned home city.

Again, I should add that I have actually mellowed a lot on Steampunk over the years, but what bothered me about the steampunky elements in Clockwork Angel was that it isn't a steampunk setting. Steampunk posits an alternate reality in which the progress of technology is fundamentally different, but this clearly isn't true in the Cassandraverse – we know that, supernatural elements aside, the New York of the Mortal Instruments trilogy looks exactly like the real New York. Yet somehow the villain of The Infernal Devices is able to build humanoid robots which follow verbal commands, believably pass as human, and move sufficiently well to stand up to trained Shadowhunters in a one-on-one fight, and he is able to do this without using magic. Clare just seems to assume that because it is The Victorian Times people have access to steampunk technology that somehow ceases to exist somewhere between 1878 and 2010.

It's not the steampunkyness that I object to per se, rather it's the thoughtless assumption that (a) England (b) the late nineteenth century and (c) steampunk are basically the same thing. It's like Clare was unable to imagine a novel set in England that was not set in the Victorian era, unable to imagine a novel set in the Victorian era that was not set in England, and unable to imagine a novel set in either England or the Victorian era that did not include steam-and-clockwork-powered mechanical marvels.

It makes it quite hard to work out where to place the books. They're so tied to the original trilogy that they don't really make sense except as a prequel series, but they make enough changes to the way the world works (seriously guys, clockwork robots are a game-changer) that they don't feel quite like they're set in the same universe. It's a lot like the Star Wars prequels in that respect, you have to really squint to imagine that the events established in the original canon logically follow from the world established in the prequels.

The weirdness is compounded by the fact that half the characters in the book have the same surnames as characters from the previous book. I get that this provides a sense of continuity, but rather than making the story feel like part of a consistent world, it makes it feel like it's just set in a weird AU where everybody is a Victorian (like that Marvel comic where it's the X-Men except that they're in 1602). The strange fake feeling isn't helped by the fact that people not only fail to act in any way like actual Victorians but also draw attention to the fact that they aren't in any way acting like actual Victorians. So Tessa tries for about two chapters to refer to Will as “Mr Herondale” but then just forgets, she points out how peculiar it is that she Shadowhunters all refer to each other by their first names, but they still do it. Yes you can claim that it's all “Shadowhunter tradition” but it seems a giant fucking coincidence that the eternal and unchanging traditions of the Shadowhunters align so perfectly with twenty-first-century social conventions despite their having been instituted n-thousand years ago. It's like that bit in City of Ashes where they explain that “adult” in Shadowhunter tradition means “eighteen year old” because “teenagers are a modern concept”.

The awkward sense of history is at its most jarring when it comes to gender politics. Tess pays lip-service to having internalised sexism, but after expressing mild surprise that in Shadowhunter society Women Are Allowed To Have Power And Fight Like Men she just goes with it. Except later it seems that Shadowhunter society is kind of sexist after all (Charlotte, the Shadowhunter who runs the institute, can do so only because she does it jointly with her affable buffoon of a husband, and her gender apparently causes her political difficulties) which for me shoves the whole thing down the uncanny valley. If it's a gender-equal society, why does Charlotte get a hard time for being a woman? If it isn't, why don't they keep their women at home making Shadowhunter babies? Again it all feels oddly specific, like the Shadowhunters are eternally stuck in a kind of late-twentieth-early-twenty-first-century mindset with very, very vague nods to whatever time period they happen to be cosplaying as.

The gender politics get particularly confusing when we get to the character of Jess. Jess is the Isabel of this book (although she's fair-haired this time, meaning her hair is presumably the colour of blonde ink) only instead of being a badass dominatrix, she's a (relatively) proper Victorian lady who isn't interested in fighting demons at all, and who wants to move out of the Institute and find herself a husband. Jess is very nearly an interesting character, but I could never quite work out whether I was supposed to find her situation complex and ambiguous or whether I was just supposed to think she was shallow and stupid. Read charitably, Jess asks us to question the morality of Shadowhunter society (which is trying to force her into a life she doesn't want, just as Victorian society forces many mundanes into lives they don't want) and to recognise that some women really will choose marriage and domesticity over excitement and adventure, and that there is nothing wrong with this. Read uncharitably she's there exclusively to make the heroine look good.

I'm going to close this review by mentioning the two Author's Notes at the end (this really, really feels like a fandom thing to me – I half expect the next book to open with bold text saying: Disclaimer: I don't own any of … oh wait). I've already mentioned the one about the poetry, but there's also a lovely note about “Tessa's London” which begins thus:

The London of Clockwork Angel is, as much as I could make it, an admixture of the real and the unreal, the famous and the forgotten.

Good old Cassie and her thesaurus. But I do wonder what she means by “as much as I could make it,” surely as long as the book contains at least one real thing (like say, the name of the city) and at least one unreal thing (like say, the character of Will Herondale) then she has succeeded in her goal.

Either way, thus ends the review. A review that is, as much as I could make it, an admixture of the fair and the unfair, of sincerity and sarcasm.