Customer Reviews

The House on Durrow Street

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The House on Durrow Street is the second installation of a series that is best described as Regency fantasy written by Galen Beckett. I loved the first book, The Magicians and Mrs Quent, but unfortunately I was quite disappointed by the second. (Note that spoilers for the first book follow.)

The Magicians and Mrs Quent left off with Ivy triumphant over the order of magicians that had tried to abuse some artifact her locked away by her father in his old house on Durrow St. Now, in the second installment, she is happily married to Mr Quent, and they are in the midst of renovating the same house, which boasts a number of eccentricities and a strange history of its own. Meanwhile, Cerephus, the red planet first mentioned at the end of The Magicians and Mrs Quent, looms ever closer in the sky (a portent of doom -- I am reminded a bit of the moon from Majora's Mask), and with it comes all kinds of disruptions to the peace of Altania. There is a vague feeling of conspiracy and evildoers lurking in the wings, but their existence is never really made explicit until about the last third of the book.

I should say there were things I enjoyed about this book, and about the universe that Beckett has created as a whole. Both novels are set in what might be described as a parallel Great Britain. The setting is well-imagined, and even though for the most part it feels like Jane Austen's England, you never forget that it is a completely different world, one that contains witches and magicians and is ominously shadowed by a strange, almost Lovecraftian mythos. There were portions of The House on Durrow Street that gave me chills.

Unfortunately, what Beckett has written is not a dark fantasy with Austenian elements, but rather the reverse. Every time Ivy, the protagonist, makes a discovery that might help to unravel the strange (and rather vague) mystery concerning the incoming planet and the strange red world she glimpses through the Eye, she ends up setting it aside for later, usually because someone requires her attention or company in some trivial activity. I understand that this is a consequence of the Regency elements of the story that I found so charming in The Magicians and Mrs Quent, but this time I found it really frustrating to have such a fragmented overall plot. I suppose this is because I didn't really care for the interactions between Ivy and the rest of Society this time around; I found those scenes to be rather dull, and punctuated by badly-written dialogue. A lot of people criticized the first book for its reliance on elements from Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights, but I think that Beckett lost a lot of direction when he moved away from them.

Furthermore, I stopped caring about the majority of the characters. Between the transition of book one to two, they somehow lost their sparkle. My biggest complaint is with Ivy herself; it seems that she has become the paragon of sensibility and can do no wrong, likening her to Fanny Price, another character I just can't stand. I do appreciate that Mr Rafferdy has seemed to grow as a character by the book's end. Eldyn, on the other hand, had very few interactions with either of the other lead characters, making his scenes seemed out of place and almost irrelevant.

Finally, there is the infuriating problem of nothing actually getting resolved in the end. All I can say is, I don't think I can take another 700 pages to find out what eventually happens to these characters and their world. I will try to read the next book, if there is one; only, I hope that Beckett starts to move things along, because I felt as though I were trapped in the doldrums for the entirety of this latest installment.

My favorite thread of the novel and I would say the most important thematically is the one that follows Ivy. She is now restoring the *House on Durrow Street* of the title, so she can live there with her husband and sisters and eventually her father. But as befits the former abode of a powerful magician and as we slowly find out, a line of magicians too, the house itself is a powerful magical locus with lots of "stuff" inside.

Ivy is now accepted at the highest levels of society - though few know her powers and even fewer her mysterious background of which one issue is still a mystery with possibly large implications - but she discovers that life at that level can be both interesting and frustrating, while friends and foes are not so easy to discern.

I also liked Mr. Rafferdy's thread since despite his "gentleman wastrel" appearance, Rafferdy is as likable a character as Ivy. He is now in a funk for obvious reasons, though he manages to keep himself busy attending the Assembly in the place of his ailing father. Despite trying to avoid both things, he gets himself sucked back into magic and he returns to Ivy's orbit however emotionally painful that is for him - after all the pair of them: magician and witch is almost unstoppable as we clearly saw in The Magicians and Mrs Quent.

The third thread follows Eldyn and Dercy and it took lots of pages, being developed to a surprising end. This storyline is quite important for "depth reasons" since through the eyes of the two, we see the world of Altania from the viewpoint of the less privileged. Here The House on Durrow Street goes way beyond the classics that inspired it (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre...) into social commentary. Class, "official morality", official belief system are all challenged and dissected. The conflicted Eldyn who must choose between his "beliefs" and his love for Dercy becomes one of the strongest characters of the series.

The House on Durrow Street is a novel of manners, wit, great characters and immersion in a world that is lovingly described. The intrigue and suspense build slowly, but when it is time for action, Ivy and Mr. Rafferdy do not hesitate and they turn their wits and powers once more to protect Altania from occult dangers, while Mr. Quent and the king's secret police led by Lady Shayde protect it from more mundane ones.

Dark times are announced for Altania and the world and while Ivy and Rafferdy may save the day one more time here, the next time the enemy may be just too powerful. Well, we will see that of course. Despite being a middle book in a trilogy, the novel provides a very satisfactory reading experience on its own and ends at a natural stopping point.

The House on Durrow Street (A++) is one of those novels that stay with you for a long time and I plan to reread the whole series across the years. Despite its almost 700 pages bulk, I just hated that it ended and there are few books I feel that strongly about.

Perhaps it's not a very good reason, but I like both this and the preceding "Galen Beckett" novel because Altania is a place I am fond of. I'd like to go live there (after the Lovecraftian soul-suckers and their human henchpersons have been defeated, of course). In particular, I LIKE the weird day/night scheme ("umbrals" and "lumenals"), and I don't mind that this phenomenon is never explained. Maybe that's because I'm seriously dyschronic; I can't seem to get up and go to sleep at regular hours, and showing up on time for appointments and meetings is a rarity for me...but hey, in Altania, I'd at least have an excuse! I like the notion that an umbral can last long enough to create a "winter", or a lumenal can make the world tropical. To me, it's a bit of atmospheric whimsy (so to speak), and shouldn't be examined too closely.

A lot of people have complained that Beckett's emulation of Brontė, Austen, Dickens, et. al. marks his work as unoriginal. I might perhaps have had the same reaction, could I recall anything I have read by those authors. Regrettably, I was forced to read them in high school, so I put them through the brain eraser after the end of the semester, along with everything else I was made to "learn". Perhaps if you are a literatus who greatly admires these authors, you will react against this pastiche. For myself, I can't tell whether the author has hewn too close to the source material as to cross into outright plagiarism--or at least unoriginality. I can only say I found all the first book (The Magicians and Mrs. Quent) and most of this one highly entertaining.

There were two things I didn't like about The House on Durrow Street. One was the entire "Illusionist" thread. For some reason, only homosexual men can be "Siltheri" and create illusions (did I just miss that in the first book?). It's not clear whether the Siltheri are frowned upon by polite society because they create illusions, or because they have sex with each other. The whole persecution sub-plot concerning the Evil Cleric, the Siltheri, and the Soul Suckers From The Red Planet is extraneous to the book, heavy-handed and saccharine.

Oh, and the second thing I didn't like was that no one throttled Sashie between the first novel and the second. Inexplicably, dearest Sashie has turned to religion, and spends all her time dusting plaster saints and crawling under pews to sweep out cobwebs for the Verger of Graychurch. There is hope, though, that she will not make the third book--at the end of Durrow Street, she gets herself to a nunnery, so to speak. But might it not be even better if a specially odious and grotesque death at the hands of the Soul Suckers awaits her in the next installment? Yes!

I think that's pretty much it. Oh, did I mention I don't like Sashie?

The first book was one of the best reads of 2008. This is still a great read also, but there is something lacking and something added. We have three protagonists, Mrs. Quent, Rafferdy and Garritt. Just as the first book, we had these three lead us along on adventure.

There are many elements of regency romance in these books and the dialogue is so well done that it adds to the richness of the story. One thing that is not well done is the passing of the responsibilities of the previous generation to the next. It is not very believable that Lord Rafferdy does not explain all to his son. With so much of importance happening and set to happen, his son surely needs to know or have someone to talk to. That the father is the CIA or the kingdom, seems more like a device to keep knowledge the son needs away from him.

That Mrs. Quent can not see the unrequited love of her friend, also is hard to believe. In a society where friendships are pretty well moderated, having a man be the kind of friend that Mrs. Quent now has, should be a clear sign that something is amiss.

The last quibble, and because the book is so rich, they are all quibbles, is that the enemy is fairly obvious by the time we reach him. Perhaps not all of his ties, but one subplot that involves us is very decipherable. Action also is somewhat lacking in this book until the end. A red herring, or just something to remind the heroes that they are heroic and did heroic acts in the previous book, and should not rest on their laurels or be on vacation, would have been nice.

This book definitely ends with plans for the next. One hopes it will arrive much sooner than this sequel did.

One expects this book to be as excellent as the first one, given the story line. Unfortunately this is a big yawn. The action doesn't even begin to commence until 300 pages into the book. I was very disappointed in this sequel as it is clearly created to force us to move to a 3rd installment. Lots of cleaver writing abounds around ho hum topics. i suggest you skip it.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in this series, and I tried very hard to enjoy this one, as well. But frankly, it was just disappointing. The pacing of the book is extremely slow. Beckett waits until the last hundred pages of this rather thick tome to actually get the action going. And even then, the ultimate defeat of this book's villain was extremely anti-climatic. Additionally, the 'heroine' of the novel barely manages to figure out a single thing of the conflict on her own. She is constantly having to be told by others what's going on and what she needs to do. In fact, if it weren't for the stereotypical moment towards the end where the villain traps our heroine and proceeds to tell her every last detail of his plans, neither our hero nor the reader would have any idea what the villains were actually trying to accomplish throughout the story.

All in all, this was disappointing. I don't know if I'll bother to pick up the next one.

I enjoyed all the different threads in this entry in the series - Ivy's, the illusionists', Rafferdy's.

Although at times the evil seemed too smarmily evil to be true, well, that has turned out to be the case in some of the evil engendered by religion in our real-life world as well, and so, although at first glance one might think that the various clerics, who range from inane and clueless to actively malevolent, are caricatures, on reflection one has to consider that in some ways this is just a reflection of the evils of the established Roman Catholic church we know. If you are as fed up with organized religion as I am, you will enjoy this theme too.

Other reviewers have already described the main plot threads - and I have to especially agree with one of them that Sashie is a character I would just as soon have seen killed off, though going to a nunnery may be as good as it gets. But I won't spend more space repeating those descriptions. Instead, let me warn you that I am going to describe something I saw in this novel that I don't think the other reviewers did, and it will contain spoilers.

SPOILER ALERT! One word: Pern. Okay, let me elaborate on that. If you are a long-time fantasy/science fiction reader, of course you have read Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. You will recall that it took a while before we found out exactly what the dragons were really there for: to fight the "threadfall" from a wandering planet (yes, if you know Greek, that's redundant) that occasionally approaches Pern, which is inimical to the human life on the planet and indeed to much of the native life; the dragons' fire-breathing capabilities evolved to burn the thread as it falls. Well, what do we have here in Beckett's world? We have a "12th planet" coming toward the planet Altania is located on, and the closer it gets, the easier it seems to be for evil beings from that planet to manifest on Ivy's planet, where their main purpose seems to be to destroy life. Ivy's planet's natural defense system is: The Wyrdwood! When necessary, the Wyrdwood can move about - Uprisings - and can kill the "demons" from the red planet. The trees respond mainly to female "witches" among the humans, just as on Pern, it was a female protagonist who managed the strongest dragon. So, substitute your intelligent trees for your intelligent dragons, and there are many more parallels to be drawn - the people who don't want to support them because they don't think the threat is real; the people who are resentful of power they don't have, and who want to kill them off simply to increase the power of their own factions... overall, it's a lot of fun doing a "compare and contrast" as you read, seeing how Beckett can do things both similarly and entirely differently. The world here remains unique, but it's also got its resemblances to the classics of F/SF, and it's nice to have that.

I also really like the eyes in the house. More eyes, please!

In the sequel to the Magicians and Mrs Quent, Ivy is now married and starting to establish herself in both society and in her father's house on Durrow Street. However dark forces still threaten Altania, and Ivy's abilities, along with her continuing friendship with Mr. Rafferdy, are vital in protecting her friends and homeland. The writing is as masterful as in the first novel, the world of Altania is enchanting, and the book draws to a breathtaking and thrilling conclusion that, while leaving plenty of development for the next book, does not leave any plot line unsatisfied. If I were to quibble, the portrait of noble society does not quite ring true (for example I find it hard to believe that the son of a lord would not be acquainted with another great magnate's son even if only casually) on occasion and I'm still not sure why Sashie had a role in the books (I find myself wanting to believe that she is secretly being trained as a ninja assassin or that she is actually the evil genius behind the whole plot). Overall though this is a wonderful read, as good if not better than the first book, that I would recommend to any fantasy fan, or indeed any fan of the regency genre.

In terms of overall craft, the first book in this series -- "The Magicians and Mrs. Quent" -- is probably the better read. It was structured in three parts, the first reading like a Jane Austen novel, the second like a Brontė novel and the third like dark fantasy with elements of the first two parts. This book is much less adventurous: where the first book experimented with different styles based on the general feel of each section (part two was written in an epistolary style, for instance), this one stays very much in the same vein.

One of the other reviews of this book (by Tina Wang) complains that this book is "not a dark fantasy with Austenian elements, but rather the reverse." Ms. Wang is absolutely correct in her assessment: the characters are often frustratingly easily distracted from the real meat of the story. She similarly points out that the third thread about Eldyn rarely intersects with the others and thus seems irrelevant. As I was reading, I often found myself irritated when a chapter with Eldyn appeared and I can't help but hope that he doesn't show up again in the sequel.

That said, I think this book deserves four stars based on the end. While it remains slow and I sometimes found my attention wandering, the last few chapters were extremely gripping, possibly because of the foundational work established by the slow beginning. How successful the sequel will be is anyone's guess -- if Beckett maintains the Lovecraftian Regency dark fantasy setting that he has established so far and doesn't indulge himself quite so much with the details of the characters' everyday lives, then this could be fantastic. If not, well, that'd be one more book I don't need to read.

"The House on Durrow Street" is the second book in the 'Mrs. Quent ' series by Galen Beckett. This book is 704 pages in length.

*SPOILER*

This book continues to follow the lives of our three main protagonists; that being Mrs Quent, Mr Rafferty and Eldyn Garritt. Danger still lurks for the land of Altania and our heroes/heroine must combine all the threads of information that they glean from various encounters and use this knowledge to thwart the newest threat.

*END SPOILER*

Beckett is a great writer with a natural gift for prose. The author does a wonderful job of presenting this Victorian-like setting and then embellishing it with witches, magic, illusions and a subtle underlying tension There are moments, especially towards the end when it was difficult to not turn the pages faster than one could read. Confrontations and showdowns are usually resolved without explicit graphic violence (in keeping with the gentile Victorian-era sensitivities, I suppose), and if anything this descriptive technique fits perfectly into the general mind-set of this interesting work.

A minor concern...
As much as I liked this novel (and look forward to the next in the series), there were periods that it was a little too much "Pride and Prejudice" and not enough of the fantasy/adventure component. At times the chivalrous nature, conversations and attitudes almost drove me to distraction. As with the first novel ("The Magicians and Mrs. Quent") a great deal of the first 2/3 of this book was spent in social relationships...please visualize afternoon tea with pinkie finger extended accompanied by ever-so polite and socially correct conversations and decorum. Most of these 'scenes' were somewhat extended (i.e. boring) but usually resulted in some important nugget of information being revealed that was essential to the overall plot. What I'm trying to say is that it became very easy to become restless reading this book...I just needed a little more happening, more often.

Conclusion:
Despite my concerns, an extremely satisfying second book in this series. But just a little more action spread among the social gatherings would have been very much appreciated. 3 to 3 1/2 Stars.

Ray Nicholson