A Serious Review of a Fun Book

Rivers of London Vol. 1: Body Work by Ben Aaronovitch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've given up on as many graphic novels as I've finished. I can't say why they don't really work for me so much of the time. But I really liked this one.

I had just read the first novel in the series and liked the premise and characters, and I saw that there was a series of comics, and I had to check it out. I was happy to find the tone and style so close to the novel.

Peter Grant is a young London policeman who sort of stumbled into a specialty, which is solving all the weird cases. He works with an older man who is teaching him the secrets of the arcane as they follow clues. They also live in a cool old house in the only part of London I know from a single brief visit there, and drive a cool car, and have other awesome artifacts. From the first story, and continuing here, you find ghosts, river spirits, vampires, and every sort of oddity, but it's all rooted in the real streets of London.

The mix is what works so well, I think. We have a young man who leads a normal life interacting with magic and figures from folklore, and we have figures from folklore interacting with normal life (such as the beautiful river spirits who like to shop and go clubbing). In my words, looking back, it kinda sounds ridiculous, which is why it's good I'm not the author. It took a better writer to make it engaging and believable and fun and as much character-driven as plot-driven.

The inclusivity of the novels and this graphic novel--Peter is a black Londoner, and many of the characters, including the spirits, are also black or Muslim or Asian--is one of the aspects that makes it feel more modern and believable and, for me, enjoyable. It breaks out of the insular (pun intended), parochial, narrow view that makes reading some older English writing so claustrophobic. It's a shame that the author, Ben Aaronovitch, is not an own-voices writer for any of those communities--for which he can hardly be blamed, but there it is--but his is a robust, respectful multicultural London, and it is fun to read. In fact, I would suggest that that is his strength: rendering a modern, complex London. The city, with all its variety, its long history, its diverse cultural antecedents, its evolution and gradual, though incomplete, elimination of class and gender divides, its uneven post-colonial melding of immigrant peoples, can almost be viewed the main character here, and he definitely shows us that character from the inside, as someone who really knows it.

Recommended. The books, too.

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