Kiki's Reviews > Clockwork Angel

What a load of bloody melodrama. This book ought to be sung in operatic fashion by a cast of three in a slightly seedy theatre in Brooklyn. It's the sort of book that's dreadfully self-important but really, when you think about it, nothing happens: a few people appear, some technology gets destroyed, two things kiss and stuff, and between all that is a metric ton of filler.

Listen, I'm not going to lie and say I didn't kind of enjoy it. This was my third attempt at reading this, and I guess third time's a charm. I got through it in two and a half days, and two of those days were spent mostly at work and doing other things. It's not something you need to funnel a lot of time into and it's not something that requires a great deal of thought. All of the deep talk about humanity and love and family and quoting from books I never intend to read is just a smokescreen to disguise that this book is thin, its characters are thin, its mythology is particularly thin, and even some obvious fanservice in the form of Magnus Bane couldn't spice it up.

It's not a bad book; it's not a good book, either. The problem with Cassandra Clare is that she creates great side characters and shite main characters. Tessa and Will are straight-up shite. They're bad people and absolutely tone deaf to what's going on around them, even when it's endangering the lives of the people they "care about". Those air quotes are for real. Neither of them are particularly interested anything other than each other's smell. They're like dogs at the park; the leaves and the trees and the brisk wind is cool and everything but when there's another dog in a ten-foot radius, oh-ho. Forget comfortable lead walking. Actually, just say goodbye to that dog. Nothing else matters.

I love Jem, but that's the problem, isn't it? He's a side character and yet he's so much more more worthy of being a protagonist than Tessa. I want to follow Jem. I want to know Jem. But instead we're trailing along on Tessa's skirts, watching her waffle from room to room of this unnecessarily massive Institute, ruin plans, beg for Will's attention, and generally oscillate around the library while everyone else does the work. I don't expect Tessa to be Xena, because she's not been trained in combat, but if she isn't trained, don't take her on a mission into a vampire nest. Jesus Christ, how have these Shadowhunters survived so long if they're so dense?

There's something almost creepy about this fad of asshole love interests; I know it started long ago, with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, experiencing a Renaissance with Bedward, and soaring to unprecedented heights in anything written by Cassandra Clare. I mean it - anything. There's probably an asshole love interest on her shopping list. There's probably one written into the alphabet magnets on her fridge. Will is a nasty piece of shit, and he's rewarded for that by having so many people around him who love him. Someone like Will, who victim-blames, who taunts women, who throws Tessa's confidence and her affection back in her face, doesn't deserve to be surrounded by people who are constantly forgiving him. I know Clare well enough to be certain that there's some sort of "I push people away to protect them" backstory buried under all of this, but that's not enough. Will is simply a nasty bastard with a piss-poor attitude.

I think my biggest problem with this book is that it's just sort of limp. The setting felt sort of half-hearted, a kind of par-boiled vision of stereotyped London. At one point Jem says to Tessa, "You're thinking, If they call this damp nastiness summer, what must winter be like? You'd be surprised. Winter's actually much the same." I live on the east coast of Scotland. This summer I got sunburnt three times and lay out in a tank top in the park, sunbathing with the dogs. I am much farther north than London, which is in the south of England, and experiences a warm temperate summer and mild springs and autumns. The rainiest months in the UK are the winter months, and April and July. Every few years the dryness in southern England causes a hosepipe ban. So fine, set your book outside of America. That's cool. I'm sick of books about New York. But for god's sake, ask. Read a few blogs. Ask the people who live there what's it's like. "It rains in Britain". Yeah, it rains in the desert too. Your setting is a sad shoehorn for mean boys and bland girls.

This whole Shadowhunter thread just rubs me up the wrong way. I don't like Shadowhunter culture, politics, or mythology. I don't like the way the Shadowhunters mock the Silent Brothers, who are also Shadowhunters but apparently undeserving of respect because they're ugly; I don't like the way the Shadowhunters profess to protect humans but treat them like animals and slap them with a label as demeaning as "mundanes"; I don't like the way they use Downworlders, but how this is excused by the narrative, which tells us that the relationship is edgy between the Clave and Downworlders, but it's fine because the Shadowhunters only hunt the Downworlders whom the narrative dubs "evil" and stroke the ego of those it proclaims "good". No grey area there, then! As long as we only kill the "bad guys" and have sex with the "good guys" (in secret), then it's not about power and control and it's not a privileged few creating a dichotomy out of those they deem less worthy than them. Right? RIGHT?

I'm assuming that this is to swiftly avoid the Shadowhunters being labelled problematic, but it's not the way they use Downworlders that makes them so fucked up. It's the small things, like Jessamine being demonized for not wanting to hunt monsters, the othering of the Silent Brothers, the amount of money that is poured into maintaining the absolutely massive Institutes that house about five Shadowhunters each. The Shadowhunters wonder why demons and warlocks and vampires hate them, and maybe it's not because they hunt them, but because they're so corrupt.

Even things we're supposed to think of as charitable, like Sophie and Thomas and Agatha being employed at the Institute, is fucked up. The Shadowhunters employing those people is as good as signing their death warrants. How can they possibly justify swanning around and calling humans "mundanes", then inviting them into their home to work for them, then leaving them to die in the name of an exclusive creed that they're not allowed membership of. How dare the Shadowhunters drag human Sophie, Agatha and Thomas into their war? And of course, after the clockwork (fucking steampunk. Ugh) creatures attack the Institute, all of our precious Shadowhunters are alive without a scratch, and only the humans who they looked down upon died.

The Shadowhunters have no connection to the outside world - they exist inside a glass case of superiority, supposedly protecting humans that they attack with slurs and have no interactions with. Even in the Mortal Instruments, it was said that Jace, Alec and Isabelle had only met a handful of people their own age, and they never ever mixed with humans. What sort of protectors are they, if the thing they're protecting is looked at with such disgust? Why are the Shadowhunters even doing this job? For their own satisfaction? It's got nothing to do with protecting the world. It's about bloodlust, because they don't care a whit about the everyday "mundane" on the street, unless it's to laugh about their deaths or have sex with them.

God, fuck the Shadowhunters. What dicks.