Elin Gregory

This is less of a weekend recommendation – though it is, you’d be daft not to read this series – than a stream of consciousness mumble. You see, the book roused some very very strong feelings in me and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. This isn’t usual for me when reading books labelled romance. Most draw to a satisfying conclusion with everyone happy and I can go on to the next book without any worries. But occasionally I read something that I can’t leave alone and I worry it like a dog that can’t quite get that last bit of marrow out of a bone. Usually I keep my mumbles to myself but I did sort of promise the author to let her know what I thought and since it’s good – hey 2 birds one stone.

The book? Jackdaw by K J Charles – the final episode in her terrific Magpie Lord series. The bird I’d have loved to stone Jonah Pastern, one of the antagonists of the previous book, Flight of Magpies.

Now this isn’t a normal recommendation where I provide enough of a tease to, hopefully, persuade people to read and buy. So THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

I can’t stress that strongly enough so let’s have it again.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS

If you haven’t read the book yet, do that first then come back and you can tell me how wrong I am about everything.

Okay? You’re sure? Let’s get on then.

I want to talk about bad things. Bad people doing bad things. Good people doing bad things. Bad people doing good things. And the reasons behind it all. There have to BE reasons otherwise it’s just all random stuff, cardboard villains and angst for the sake of it.

I’ve read 3 books this week that were parts of series where an antagonist from a previous book is promoted to protagonist and love interest. This is a brave thing to do because readers who are following the series have had time to learn to hate the antagonist and presumably he has done things to earn that hatred. Now that he’s the protagonist our sympathies are supposed to be with him but are we supposed to forget the things he has done?

So here we have Jonah Pastern, magical practitioner, con man, habitual and casual thief. Jonah is amoral, self obsessed, slyly clever but not too bright and all about what’s best for Jonah. As the Flight of Magpies unfolds it’s clear that Jonah is the worst sort of villain. It also becomes clear that Jonah is under some compulsion to act as he does, so I was just beginning to develop a little sympathy for him but that was all wiped away at the climax of the book where he commits an act of such casual brutality that it took my breath away.

This meant that, while I was desperate to read Jackdaw, I was absolutely 100% a Jonah hater from the first page. Frankly I didn’t care why he had been pushed into helping the baddies in Flight. Sod him. I was reading it to spend more time in that world, Jonah being part of it would be endured like a bit of grit in my shoe. On the other hand I had huge sympathy for the other protagonist, Ben the disgraced policeman, when I started the book. I was really rooting for him, hoping he’d achieve a measure of happiness, hoping that he’d regain his self respect. But then HE did something I, for personal reasons, found repulsive.

So here I am reading a book where I already loathe one protagonist, suspecting him of being a sociopath, and my skin is crawling over the other because {whited out spoiler}he’s a rapist. At this point my sympathies are far more with the justiciary, vicious though their pursuit appears, than with the heroes.

Please don’t get the impression that I’m not enjoying the book! I am, enormously, but I’m reading it as an action adventure novel, not a romance. Maybe romance readers are more able to sympathise with protagonists, no matter what? Ben and Jonah needed to earn my respect and that was going to take some nifty writing.

Luckily, nifty writing is something one can expect from K J Charles. Ben’s state is resolved fairly quickly as the backstory emerges. Jolly Jonah had put him in a position that was bound to go tits up sooner or later but Jonah was winging it day by day, on the ‘so far, so good’ principle. Once the crunch came Jonah did what had worked in the past – he ran, leaving Ben to take the fall. At the beginning of the book Ben seems to be in the grip of obsession – he’ll catch and punish Jonah, not in any hope of improvement in his own state, but because that’s what the law demands. I’m pretty certain that if he had succeeded and Jonah had been taken by the justiciary, it wouldn’t have been long before Ben had quietly slipped into the Thames. There was nothing left for him and very little left of the calm, righteous and loving Ben of their days together as a couple. What he did have left, well hidden, were his feelings for Jonah. “I hate you so much I can’t bear to let anyone else punish/control/hurt/have you” looks a lot like love if you can dig down a bit, and people who have been hurt beyond bearing sometimes do repulsive things. So yeah, I warmed to Ben, a bit, because I had more of an understanding of his situation but OMG Jonah.

I can’t think of any other book where I have spent so much time growling at a protagonist without actually saying “You know what – life’s too short to put up with this guy’s fuckery” and going to read something else. That I didn’t is a tribute to the fact that the story is terrific even if I was not emotionally invested in the welfare of the protagonist.

I’ve already put my hand up to being completely prejudiced against Jonah from the start. And he kept doing stuff! There were bits of the book where I found myself hating him all over again. Let’s take a tiny for instance, almost a throwaway incident – picking pockets to get enough money for them to leave London. One could assume that he only stole from people who were clearly well off and could afford it. But I don’t buy that assumption. He is shown working a very specific, chance met crowd, fingers flickering through the pockets he encounters rather than seeking out the ones who could lose some sovereigns, curse their bad luck and go back to the bank for more. He comes up with shillings and pence. He hasn’t done that well. He was stealing from people who couldn’t afford to lose it. Taking two and six from some anonymous clerk – whose family now won’t eat for the rest of the week – is a far more serious crime than lifting a gold pocket watch from a man who can shrug and buy another. And from Jonah’s ease and competence this is his usual MO. He’s a habitual thief who gives no thought to his victims – apart from Ben.

Ben is Jonah’s Achilles heel. For the first time in his life, Jonah cares for someone – not quite as much as he cares about himself [that comes MUCH later] but he does care and that makes him vulnerable. How vulnerable only becomes apparent when Jonah’s backstory is described, in a breathless and desperate few pages, two thirds of the way through the book. OMG Jonah!

“I’m tired of being the villain in the story. I never meant to be and I don’t want to do it any more.”

Even my chilly old heart thawed a bit then as I realised – hah!! Was MADE to realise – that Jonah wasn’t just plain evil. He was doing all this shitty stuff because he didn’t know any better. His family life is glossed over but he plainly didn’t have the same kind of role models that Stephen did.

Stephen was raised by desperately afflicted but very good people and had the horrible experience of seeing what true evil could do up close and personal. So did Lucien and he was glad to be rejected by his family.

Jonah did not see that evil – he was abandoned to cope under impossible conditions and made it all up as he went along. Ben seems to have been his first proper relationship, even though he held back on trusting him, and Ben starts the process of Jonah’s rehabilitation. But I think that it’s the people of Pellore who deserve the thanks.

Jonah starts off playing them, just as if he was pulling a long con, because they aren’t real people – any more than the people he steals from are ‘real’. In Jonah’s world view, real means Jonah, and now Ben – everyone else is a threat or an opportunity. Jonah is still very much the confused 12 yr old who was thrown out of the house. It takes prolonged exposure to the personalities in the village, plus a lot of “If I behave like this it will please Ben” before Jonah begins to settle into a more normal relationship with other people. And then the long arm of the law – ie Stephen Day – catches up with them and finally the other shoe drops and confirms the pressure applied to Jonah by the antagonists in Flight. An awful, horrifying, disgusting situation that explains exactly why what happened – um – happened.

So, loads of explanations and excuses, punitive alarums and excursions and a very satisfactory resolution to the Magpie’s story arc later – do I love Jonah to bits and want him to be my book boyfriend?

Do I hell! Just for clarity, I don’t do the book boyfriend thing. Not having to is one of the reasons I read and write M/M – but even if I did, no thanks.

I have a lot more sympathy for Jonah, I understand how he got himself into the awful position he was in at the beginning of the book and at the end I’m hoping that he and Ben can settle down to a long, happy and useful life in their little community – but …

It’s that scene at the end of Flight. I can’t get past that focussed action where a person is treated as a thing. It’s all in – no messing – no “Oh I’ll just test it by doing a little bit”, but a wholehearted annihilating lack of hesitation! He was in a corner, worried sick, desperate to escape and saw a way to get the information he needed. Jonah has changed at the end of Jackdaw, but that inner ruthlessness must still be there, and I can forgive him, up to a point but I’ll never forget. That scene is going to stay with me forever.

And that, me dears, is fantastic writing.