The Bartimeaus trilogy, by Jonathan Stroud, opens with a small, frightened boy summoning a demon into his attic bedroom, in a pseudo-Victorian London. I immediately enjoyed the little details of imagery:

“Ice formed on the curtain and crusted thickly around the lights in the ceiling. Glowing filaments in each bulb shrank and dimmed, while the candles that sprang from every available surface like a colony of toadstools had their wicks snuffed out.”

These are fantasy books, shelved for the young adult but more complex in tone and subject even than most things marketed to older readers.

They are not like the easygoing, pun-filled Harry Potter series, even at its darkest. Stroud’s books are closer to Philip Pullman’s complex and violent Golden Compass. Both trilogies have themes of civic oppression and both authors are brave enough to let their characters make poor choices for good reasons. All this against a backdrop of ancient buildings, magical warfare, black cars, leather wings and villains around every corner. These are adventure stories. Despite the heady language they’re easy to read and hard to put down.

The Amulet of Samarkand (book 1), The Golem’s Eye (book 2), Ptolemy’s Gate (book 3)

The alternate London, where the boy Nathaniel lives and trains, is a place where ordinary citizens live in patriotic awe and nervous fear of the magicians who rule uncontested. Floating orbs patrol the streets searching for demons and dissenters, paralleling the CCTV surveillance of London today.

Despite a moody – sometimes bleak – setting, these books have a light heart, due mostly to the narration of the shape-shifting demon Bartimaeus. While, other characters stick to the formal language of the Victorian setting, his descriptions are snappily modern. At first I wasn’t sure I liked this effect but it grew on me, particularly his constant, dry humor.

“I’ve seen glaciers cover ground faster than that train …[it] limped off as if it were going to die under a hedge.”

Though Bartimaeus narrates much of the first and second books, they are not his story. As a slave to his magician, he can’t refuse his missions. These difficult tasks put a lot of wizz-bang adventure into the stories as Bartimaeus must fight, steal, lie and suffer for his magician. Nathaniel feels free to abuse this, he believes the demons to be evil to the core – and has good reasons for these beliefs. This is one of Stroud’s complex themes. The Trilogy explores cycles of hatred where abuse and retaliation chase each other across generations until neither side has either the moral high ground or the ability to stop. This is something that really rings true in Stroud’s universe; there are no candy-coated solutions. Cruel histories make trust and respect impossible. Peace can’t come easily between any faction.

As a reader, I respect this in a book. I don’t care for books where brave hearts and sweet talk is all it takes to solve eternal human problems. At the same time I dislike books about hopelessness. Tragedies I can handle, but I think well written tragedies are sharp and bloody – not dried up and bitter.

The first book in the trilogy, The Amulet of Samarkand, left me wondering if these books were about a child’s decent into the evils of power. The second, The Golem’s Eye, featured Kitty, a rebel girl in a dangerous and ineffectual fight for freedom. The still-young Nathaniel plays a barely-sympathetic role as her vicious adversary. I found this a very satisfying turn-around, but at the same time it was too bluntly tragic to think the frightened child had soured forever.

Fortunately, The last book, Ptolemy’s Gate, pulls it all together beautifully. In keeping with the rest of the series, there are no simple answers and no easy forgiveness for past transgressions, but the key players draw together. Bartimaeus stops being just a force of nature. Boy, girl and demon begin to understand each other. In the end, all three make tragic, and painfully hopeful sacrifices.

“Love conquers” is hard to do without going syrupy, especially in a fantasy, but Stroud pulls if off. For me, it was the way he shows how very difficult and vital the path away from hatred really is.