MODERN MAGIC
by Anne Cordwainer
I've been a fan of "urban fantasy" since before I knew it had a name. Sometime in middle school I left behind the “high fantasy” of wizards and dragons, having developed a preference for science fiction’s starships and aliens, but I never lost my taste for stories of the supernatural set in the modern world we live in. Most Stephen King fits into this niche, as well as Alan Dean Foster’s Into the Out Of, which involves the demons known to the African Masai tribe as “shetani”. And when I discovered Charles DeLint a few years ago, I was in fantasy heaven. So Anne Cordwainer’s Modern Magic is right up my alley. The premise is similar to that of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series: that magic-users live among us in secret.
The novel, called “a story cycle” on the cover, is comprised of “episodes” that span a decade from 1998 to 2009. The first-person narrative alternates between Liz Prospero, the only non-magical daughter of a renowned sorcerous family (Rowling would call her a “squib”), and her brother John, who is graduating from sorcerer college at the beginning of the book. As the story progresses, Cordwainer’s world-building comes into focus as each episode deals with renegade sorcerers abusing their power and how they are dealt with by the rest of the magical community. For centuries sorcerers have relied on the “family honor” system to keep themselves ethical, with apprehended miscreants being turned over to their families for discipline. But with the sorcerer population having grown, magical crime is on the rise and the system of “family honor” is proving inadequate to the task – some begin to believe that the community must come together and organize a formal justice system for sorcerers before the entire magical world devolves into anarchy. There is apparently more to this setting than the novel alone; an end note after the story advises the reader to check annecordwainer.com for more stories in the same world, as well as details about events only briefly described as back story in the novel.
While the novel’s episodes appear at first to be a series of independent stories, they develop an arc in which incidents involving criminal sorcerers escalate in seriousness until the situation seems almost hopeless. Admittedly I’m not the most perceptive reader, but the writer kept me in the dark enough that I did not see the reveal of the villain coming, though it was set up fairly early in the novel. The characters have their own development arcs as well: Liz at first wants as little to do with her family as possible, resenting their superior power and her own apparent inadequacy, but by the end she accepts her family and her place in it, and realizes that she has something to contribute to sorcerer society despite her own lack of magical ability. John has great power but is cautious to a fault about the possibility of abusing it; he slowly grows to find confidence both in his power and his judgment.
Overall I’m satisfied with the book; I enjoyed the read (which occupied most of an afternoon, about four or five hours) and on a five-star scale I’d give it four. I reserve five-star ratings for the truly sublime, but Modern Magic is pretty damn good. Nicely done, Cordwainer (if that is your real name); I’m interested to see what you turn out next.
