Sorry - this entry is only in English - too much text to translate as a hobby.
Deconstructing Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare.
I started reading these series as guilty pleasure - as a literary equivalent of a bag of chips - not really good for me but still fun to read. This book quickly transgressed from fun to tedious to subsequently “I do not care anymore”. Inevitably I wondered if anybody had made a deconstruction yet, surprisingly my search returned with nothing. Having followed several brilliant deconstruction posts has made me somewhat bolder in my attempts to deconstruct something myself.
Before I start I must get a couple of nicks out of the way.
Firstly I have nothing against the author and her personality/past/choices in life. I'm not discussing her. I`m discussing her work which many of us have a chance to read and appreciate.
Secondly - I have nothing against fan fictions turned original works.
Thirdly - I have not read the book series which this is meant to be a prequel of, Mortal Instruments series, was it? I`m too lazy/do not have the time for 5+ books and counting, furthermore according to some, this series (The Infernal Devices) is regarded as better and has only 3 books, which is doable.
Without further ado, I proudly present chapter one.
Off goes the amazing adventure of cogwheels, aether and romanticized technology which still runs on magic...except that no, it doesn`t. Instead we are greeted by an entire poem by Elka Cloke. Theoretically it could fit, the book is set against the backdrop of fictional industrial revolution with coal dust in the air and werewolf labourers (spoiler) and, of course, the dour and dark “Victorian London”.There is nothing wrong with books beginning with quoting someone else, but the entire page of it, really? The poem is meant to set us in the mood for it, but all it tells me is a) author did not bother creating the atmosphere herself/added another pronto page to her book, b) to flip the page and get to the story already.
After this prelude we are greeted by one of the male protagonists (Will Herondale) who is investigating something. He casually kills a demon in the back alley, we learn that the internal fluids of these demons have corrosive qualities and he soon discards his corroding weapon. This is important, in this particular case their weapons could be used only once or twice, he should not be alone in that alley, they should be two - his partner would have an extra knife in case Wills` weapons dissolve before the job is done. However his partner, male protagonist Nr 2, James Carstairs, who should have been covering Will, had wandered off somewhere, probably to do his other, less agreeable activities. I point this out now but in fact this issue keeps popping up across the series. You could chalk it up to youth and hormone-driven incompetence but it seems a bit off for people you dispatch on missions. If they are trainees, it could still be acceptable for them to commit mistakes and, say, just wander around collecting clues that have no chance of running off with the carcass of their partner in maw, but then you do not send them unsupervised.
50 points from London institute for not sufficiently training their subordinates in basic stuff.
And we return back to Will Herondale trying to locate his partner. We get the glimpse of the first “mundane” - a policeman.
- ..wearing a bell-shaped helmet, a heavy overcoat and a puzzled expression.
There is something that irks me about the description. The policeman is “wearing” a puzzled expression while wandering streets in the middle of the night. Did he see something? Was it a funny smell? Did he see Jem murdering a girl? People do not usually wander streets permanently puzzled. Did he have curious facial features that made him look puzzled even when his face was actually placid? Will contemplates stealing the truncheon of the policeman to see him “flap around” but decides against it. If this was a one-off passage describing non-magical folk as slightly silly, I would let it slide, but I regret to say it is far from true. The author seems to establish the paradigm non-magical folk - silly and hapless, magical folk - behave like normal people. Why would a policeman flap around if his truncheon was stolen? Do all policemen do that? Would he even notice the moment it disappeared or would Will make it obvious which kind of takes the fun and sneak out of the action and defeats the purpose of him staying invisible. If Will was invisible to the eyes of the policeman, would the truncheon also become invisible once he touched it or would it just float in thin air and give the policeman the willies? Perhaps that is why he would flap?
Better yet, once the policeman passes, Will immediately calls out to Jem. I do not believe that “just passed” qualifies as out of earshot, perhaps they use some magical frequency that is not heard by normal human ears to communicate while on missions?
They are supposed to be the supersecret, bedazzled only force between humanity and flesh-eating parasite-crabs. The book lets us understand that this is not the first time Will does this. His actions upset Jem “the guy who leaves his partner behind”, strangely that upsets no one else, like institute higher-ups who probably are keeping a finger on the pulse regarding who knows what about them. Contrary to what the book tells us I feel that they are not at all concerned with keeping themselves secret. It seems more like them relying on simple folk being ignorant. Or perhaps they are considered as FBI agents - depending on their objectives some are undercover and some are not but everyone knows they exist? This is just a speculation, of course, all I get from text is that they do attempt to hide from general population, so there better be a reason for it. On the other hand shadowhunters are considered haughty jackasses by the rest of the underworld, so we never know if they actually go around annoying people and the commoners just go, oh, ok, it is Those people again, let us pretend they do not exist and maybe they will go away.
Anyway, eventually Will finds Jem and we get a full visual of the male Protagonist(2). To make it short, imagine an Asian albino. The specifics of his appearance get explained later in books and I am quite fond of the explanation. I will later elaborate why. But currently we are stuck with this.
-The young man who appeared at the mouth of the alley was pale in
the lamp light - paler than he usually was which was quite pale indeed -
Pride&Prejudice go home, you`re drunk. Why is this line here? It sticks out like a sore thumb in otherwise contemporary writing style, well if you ignore a handful of “quite” scattered across this book. I did not notice the same trend in the following books of the series. Was it a literary cameo? Does anyone know if such things exist? An expression the author loved too much to let go of in spite of better judgement? Was it an internal joke meant only for readers who know the author? I want to know.
We do not get the explanation for this stray line but we do get Jem in his war paint, smeared with blood of the enemies he'd slain valiantly in uneven combat. While coming home from the white tie event in opera, he had been ambushed by masked enemies, outnumbered he fought tooth and nail until he tore out the throat of his last opponent with his bare hands.
- There were dark stains across his white shirtfront, and his hands were thickly
smeared with red.
The deal is shadowhunters have the sexay black leather gear they wear for the outings of this sort, Jem, on the other hand is wearing a white shirt, why? Getting your bloodstained shirts white in Victorian setting must be not only time consuming, but also expensive, so I can imagine no other reason why he would be caught in an attire like this. He probably must have been to see the queen. Except that he did not do any of the other things I mentioned above, he just found a dead girl in the alley, so why does he look like he had emerged from a battleground? Is anyone else cringing from the probable amount of blood-borne diseases this girl might have? She was from a poor background, living in society that does not offer great health standards or disease screening, she had just died, so the microorganisms in her blood are still quite lively and ready for a new host.
If anything it looks to me like he is the perpetrator. I understand that he was trying to investigate, but what kind of on-spot investigation leaves you with hands and clothes thickly smeared with victims` blood? Does he wipe his dirty hands against his clothes?
Will is rightly worried assuming that it was the blood of his partner. What a lucky bastard Jem is, not only he gets away with disregarding his and his coworkers/friends safety, his partner is actually concerned about him instead of saying “serves you right for leaving me alone and wandering our without support”. Will does call him a disloyal bastard. Bonus points to Will for being observant.
So Jem explains that probably the demon Will killed earlier was after the now-dead girl. However something is fishy about this case. Apparently there is not enough blood in the alley for it to be the demons` work. There is plenty blood on Jem though, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
Furthermore killing the girl does not match the behaviour pattern that demon exhibits to its prey. We get a short description of the demon and some bad terminology. They use term “Brood parasite” to describe parasites living in broods, which this species of demon does. I`m not aware if this is a terminology the author made up for the story or is it something she heard somewhere. In our mundane world Brood parasites use their hosts to raise their young, not to feed off their bodies. Long story short - think of a cuckoo bird and you will get the idea. This demon is not a brood parasite, it acts more like the spider wasp which is an ectoparasitoid.
(Now you have reasons to be both happy and terrified - you are welcome).
Bad terminology aside, I do like that the author specifies this, it adds to the worldbuilding and makes it more creepy if that is your thing. The unfortunate thing is that it is the last time you are going to hear about this or any other demon in such detail. Savor it.
We find out that the girl was indeed stabbed several times by someone who was not the demon Will had just killed and that she was running away and died of blood loss. Not knowing exactly where she was stabbed makes it a bit tricky but knowing that she did not die of infection, I will go ahead and presume that it was the vitals, furthermore it appears that the evildoer had left a knife in the victim for the laughs. How far can a young girl run before bleeding to death? Far less than action movies would let you assume. For that matter running with several stabs in your vitals is close to, well, not really possible. However no one will investigate her death in such detail, it will never be explained what purpose her death served apart from showing how chaotically awful some warlocks are (spoiler) and leading Shadowhunters to Tessa (another spoiler). I guess she is what you could call an obvious plot device. Just to put this in perspective - the entire purpose of her existence was being killed and leading the male protagonist Nr1 to Tessa.
We also get the kind of justification on why Jem is all bloody - see, he retrieved the knife from the the girl. Unless the knife was lodged inside the abdominal cavity of the victim in some outlandish and painful way forcing Jem to actually rummage through her guts to retrieve it, I still cannot imagine for the life of me why he would all be splattered with blood. Recently dying of bloodloss would mean that upon your death you have little blood left (also no blood pressure) - little to no splattering. So why blood all over the place? Fresh corpses do not just explode, which implies that, yes, given circumstances corpses can explode. But this is not the case. Fast forward - the killed girl is Emma Bayliss, killed by someone on the street for no obvious reason. She took the knife of the attacker with her - smart girl. She had the knife In Her Hand or close by as she probably must have dropped it while losing consciousness. So Jem has no excuse to be bloodstained unless he was the killer. Jem, I`m looking at you.
We return to our both male protagonists examining the knife. Upon closer inspection they find out that they have a clue - the knife had a symbol of Ouroboros (Two snakes biting each others tails) on it. Oh my god this is so exciting, people, they have a clue! This looks like the work of alchemists - the foolish humans to dabble in the dark arts! And they are gone - you will never hear of them again either. But wait - they Do plan to investigate this case, although it seems like they mean it in the loosest of terms.
Will - Maaan, I totally love hunting down that kind of opponent - bloody rags and pentagrams (Which, I hope, implies some level of enthusiasm).
Jem - Nah, man, I have been your friend and partner for years and I do not trust your judgement on all things downworld. (Sarcasm perhaps?)
Will - Cool - drugs, hookers and gambling! (More sarcasm?)
Jem - Whatever
And this is basically their relationship. At least from Jems` side. He is described as that kind of caring and nice guy who helps elderly ladies cross the street, but I just do not see it here. Or anywhere.
By the way, this happened in April, or so the book says, so I am exactly too months too late to be captivated entirely by the weather.
Anyway, spare me and I hope you enjoyed yourselves. You are also welcome to comment and remark.
Cheers!
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