So I’ve recently begun reading The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott and I had thought I’d wait until I’d finished book 6 and then review the series as a whole but instead I’m going to break it down as it’s taking me a while to read the books (why must life get in the way of reading?) and I’ll forget most of what happened otherwise. Books one and two are called The Alchemyst and The Magician respectively, referring to Nicholas Flamel, who serves as a mentor for the twins, and Dr John Dee, once a pupil of Flamel’s, now an immortal in the service of the Dark Elders.
The twins are Sophie and Josh Newman who possess uncommonly clear and rare auras of Silver and Gold respectively. Interestingly these auras also come with distinctive cents, vanilla for Sophie and oranges for Josh. Flamel’s aura is green and mint whereas Dee’s is yellow and sulpherous. Thanks to Harry Potter the majority of this generation’s readers will have heard the name Nicholas Flamel and may know that he is a historical figure with roads in Paris named for he and his wife Perenelle, whose home claims the title of the oldest house in Paris and is now a restaurant and apartments. Readers may not be so familiar with Dr John Dee who was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, navigator, imperialist and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I, he also chose the date of her coronation.
Sophie and Josh, who had been spending the summer with their aunt while their archeologist parents were on a dig, quickly find themselves embroiled in a world populated by myths, legends, nightmares and fantasies. And when I say quickly, books one and two take place over two, maybe three days. In that time Dee attacked Flamel, stealing the Book of Abraham the Mage, also called the Codex, but he loses the last two pages when he tears the book out of Josh’s grasp (who had been working at Flamel’s book shop). Though how he could have pulled the pages, given the description of both book and scene, is a mystery to me, but a necessary plot device to prevent Dee from releasing the ‘Dark Elders’.
Dee kidnaps Perenelle which Flamel escapes with the twins, who don’t understand why they can’t just go home. Flamel explains this is because Dee will kill them and anyone he thinks may have had contact with the book to keep it secret. Flamel takes them to Scathath; an immortal but not invulnerable, by her own admission, warrior who claims to have taught the humani how to fight. Scathath is actually a legendary Scottish warrior woman but she’s so much more in these books.
Dee attacks again, this time with rats and gollums made from mud which Flamel and Scathath defeat and then they flee to the shadow realm of Elder Hekate, the Goddess with Three Faces.* The Goddess awakens Sophie’s powers and her senses (based on the ‘humans only use a tiny percentage of their brain’ and ‘all capable of magic’ ideas) but before she can do the same for Josh, Dee attacks with Bastest (Egyptian cat goddess) and The Morrigan (the crowd goddess) destroying the shadow realm and killing Hekate.
Perenelle, still imprisoned manages to possess Sophie, whose been out of it since her awakening, giving the group the opportunity to escape and tells her husband to take them to the Witch of Endor. The Witch happens to be Scathath’s grandmother and a master of air magic, who imparts all her memories and knowledge to Sophie and uses a leygate (a mirror portal on a point where magical leylines intersect) to whisk them away to Paris to escape Dee.
Book two opens in Paris, where Dee has enlisted the help of the Italian, Niccolo Machiavelli, a historian, diplomat, philosopher, humanist and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance, who is also in the service of the Dark Elders. On top of that, he’s now one of the most powerful men in Paris and uses the local forces to try and apprehend Flamel and the children. He is initially thwarted when the party meets up with Count of St. Germain who has been variously described as a courtier, adventurer, charlatan, inventor, alchemist, pianist, violinist and an amateur composer, and is a current pop star and married, in secret, to Joan of Arc, who trained under Scathath.
Being the only non-awakened, non-immortal and entirely too human member of the team Josh not only begins to feel envious of his sister but after a run in with Dee in Ojai he doubts the intentions of Nicholas Flamel. Flamel however retrieves a sword for Josh, the twin blade to Excalibur the ice blade, and so it is the blade of fire. So while Sophie learns fire magic from St. Germain, Josh learns sword play with Joan and Scathath. Skills he has to put to fast use when Machiavelli summons three Valkyries to take out Scathath who, in turn, release one of their beasts on the Warrior that Dee accidentally freed when he destroyed the World Tree in Hekate’s shadowrealm.
Josh defeats the monster and frees Scathath, only for her to be dragged into the water by Dagon, a monster more fish than man who had, till now, been serving Machiavelli. In the confusion Dee convinces Josh to come with the Italian and he and descend into the catacombs of Paris (think the Court of Miracles if you’ve seen Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame) which do exist even to this day. Once limestone quarries they are now filled with human bones from the days of plague when the graves of Paris overflowed. There he is presented to Mars, the God of War, who awakens Josh and imparts to him battle knowledge.
Sophie, Flamel, Joan and St. Germain arrive in time to retrieve Josh from the vengeful sleeping God and trap him as he attempts to destroy them when Sophie refuses to lift a curse placed on him by the Witch of Endor who had once been his lover. Dee and Machiavelli make for higher ground, namely the top of Notre Dame and animated the famous gargoyles but Josh and Sophie combine their powers to destroy them and escape. And so the chase continues as Flamel flees Paris with the twins to London, the heart of Dee’s power, in an attempt to find another leygate to get them back to San Francisco and back to Perenelle who has been imprisoned on the abandoned Alcatraz.
Scott uses chapter changes to change scene between the twins, Dee and Perenelle however it’s difficult to pick out the protagonist at times between the twins and Flamel as it seems to change perspective between them very quickly. Flamel, and other characters, have often mentioned a prophecy in the Codex about twins, ‘the two that are one’ or something, with silver and gold auras. This is linked to Danu Talis (or Atlanatis) the paradise home of the Elders that sank after a fight between two twin Elders with auras of gold and silver. It’s also said that the Elder race pre-dates humanity and various Elders have been attributed with teaching humani how to read, write, make fire and various other evolution basics.
Now, I’m not saying I dislike this series, there are elements I do like, the characters are good and I like that there are different types of magic and different specialties. Flamel is the Alchemyst, Perenelle is the Sorceress and Dee, though referred to as the Magciain is, first and foremost, a Necromancer. However the twins element isn’t working for me so far, don’t get me wrong, I love twins, but there’s a lot of ‘we can finish each others sentences, we know when the other is in pain, we know what the other is thinking because we always think the same’. Put that together with the unclear protagonist and you begin to wonder why Scott even bothered with twins for anything other than an aesthetic reason and to be able to claim to have a lead of both gender.
We’ve seen some progression in Josh’s character and his conflicting feelings towards his sister but we see comparatively little of what Sophie is thinking and feeling from a development point of view. We see lots of her ‘oh my head hurts from all the new magic’ but not a lot else. My other problem is that the prophecy has been discussed in front of them and they didn’t seem overly curious or ask any questions until much later. They still aren’t really.
So we’ve got two books of about 400 pages each and we really haven’t seen any major plot development. We’ve seen lots of action and lots of name dropping of historical figures and mythical beings from across the ages but we haven’t progressed past, we have a prophecy, some magical twins and a man hell bent on releasing evil onto the world who needs the two final pages of the Codex. Seeing as there are four more books to go that’s a lot of room for improvement, but on the other hand I don’t really want to read a whole book full of disposable characters who may, or may not, turn up for a big finale. I’d rather have plot and main character advancement.
Now these books also show an impressive amount of research on the part of the author, both into the historical figures and the places. In fact book two displays a knowledge of Parisian streets that rivals OCR maps but as a reader who has little to know familiarity with Paris, being bombarded with street names gives me nothing. But again, these books, so far, just seem to be history books wrapped up in fiction.
This is partly the reason I chose to break this review up because I wanted to record how I was feeling now about the series and see if that changes as it progresses. So far there have been hints of greatness so here’s hoping there’ll be a big finale, but hopefully I won’t have to wait until book 6 for it and that there will be some meaty plot chunks to come.
On a more positive note I love the covers. Or at least I love the cover set I’ve displayed in this review, although mine has a slightly different format of where all the writing is but the visual is the same. Interestingly, when I went into my local book store to buy the series they only had books 1-3 and they were all in different cover sets. Now I’m assuming the ones I have are recent and re-prints because on the back I could see the titles of all 6 books and the prospective covers so I went up to the desk and asked if I could order the set in the same covers. The shop assistant told me I’d have to wait months so I resorted to getting them online and now have all 6 lined up, matching, on my shelf. Although the last book, the Enchantress I believe, is larger than the rest, might send it back and wait for the smaller paper back to be released. Though why they do alternating sizes in paper backs I don’t know.
To finish, I would encourage readers to read these books as they show a great wealth of knowledge and clearly a lot of skill linking them all up and making them fit into a recognizable magic/history system. However, were these books to be translated into film, I wouldn’t mind if they combined the books to keep the plot snappy.
On to book 3, The Sorceress.
*(If anyone has seen the 4kids dub of Yu-Gi-Oh or even Yu-Gi-Oh abridged, they will understand why I can’t take the term ‘shadow realm’ seriously.)
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