The Amulet of Samarkand, A Short Review…
I have been having a hard time catching up with my reading since I got my laptop. I know for sure that if I digg up all the records and get the statistics then I must be reading only about 60% of what I used to.
From those 60% of the books comes the Amulet of Samarakand. It is the first book from the Bartimaeus trilogy. It is based on a novel concept of modern London being ruled by magicians who summon spirits (demons to be accurate) to do their bidding. One such magician is Arthur Underwood. He is a minister in the ministry (duh). He receives an apprentice whom he must train and turn into a full fledged magician.
This apprentice, Nathaniel, is 5 years old when he starts his training which would finish when he is 12. But on his 11th birthday, he gets angry at some of the guests in a party at Underwoods’. And to take a revenge, he calls up a 5000 year old djinn (yeah… even I used to spell a jin as a jin 
) named Bartimaeus. He then orders the djinni to steal a valuable artifact (of course the Amulet) from this person, Simon Lovelace. But little does Nathaniel know what he is burying himself into. Simon Lovelace is an influential person in the Ministry and the boy is just a boy.
The story proceeds in 2 fashions. One is a third person perspective when the actions of Nathaniel are described. This is a little boring writing when compared to the other fashion. The second one is that Bartimaeus is himself telling the story as he sees it. One would think that a 5000 year old djinn would be too much to handle but this is where they might go wrong.
The story written with Bartimaeus as a narrator is the best part of the book. Full of humorous quotes and jokes. He also provides footnotes with ending comments such as ‘why are you wasting your time reading these notes for? Go read the story.’ (not in exact words). If it had not been for this unique way of writing, I would have thrown the book away (not literally) while in first 100 pages.
Finally, this book is all about politics and humour. The main theme of the story is very good and a unique one. But for what I feel is that the story of this book does not reach the expected standards (except for one point, the hero in this story actually knows things and is intelligent unlike Harry Potter of Eragon). It should have been better. The story remains something ordinary. If you have read the likes of Tolkien and… well no one. If you have read Tolkien’s works. You will not find this much appealing. (Another thing might be that I am too old for this kind of books).
Final Verdict, a must read if you are under 14-16. If you are not, I would say approach with caution.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Books, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Aditya November 16th, 2007 at 8:34 am
It was on your recommendation that I went for this series in the first place. I do have all three books and I am going to read all 3. This was only regarding the first one.
As I said, the concept is good the language even better, but the plot for book one remains somewhat poor.
Aditya