The Neon Court, by Katherine Griffin, is the third in the Matthew Swift series. It begins at the same place as the previous books, A Madness of Angels (2009) and The Midnight Mayor (2010): with protagonist Matthew Swift's life in mortal peril.

Swift wakes up inside a burning building next to his (not quite) enemy, Oda, with no idea of why he is there or how to escape. And, just as in the previous books, Griffin doesn't just start with a bang, which implies that there is a letting off. The book is more of a sustained explosion. Swift and Oda run to the rooftop, where Oda murders a daimyo of the Neon Court, a group of faeries and thralls that seem to have had a bit too much exposure to Lady Gaga. (The use of daimyo as the title of the lords of the Neon Court is either a case of appropriation of Eastern cultures by Griffin, or an ironic critique of such senseless appropriation and its ubiquitousness in Western pop culture.) Oda and Swift's subsequent escape from the burning building, which involves a giant bird created out of discarded plastic bags, is as whimsical and strangely practical as I've come to expect from Griffin's brand of urban sorcery.

Swift and Oda find a motel for the night, and the next day Swift wakes to find that the Neon Court is blaming the Tribe, a group of magical outcasts who find power in self-mutilation, for the murder of its daimyo. The only way he can prevent a war is by bringing the Chosen One to the Lady Neon, the Faerie Queen. In his free time, he must also figure out why the sun won't rise; why London neighborhoods are disappearing one after another; and why Oda is sharing her body with a nightmare that leaves people bleeding to death through their burst eyeballs.

There is an episodic, repetitive nature to the Matthew Swift series that has more in common with mystery books and TV serials than with most Western fantasy works. In particular, it seems to have a lot in common with Doctor Who. The threats faced are both terrifying and absurd; the series is more about sustained action sequences than plot and characterization; the dialogue, no matter who the speaker or what the situation, is full of flippant one-liners. Just like the Doctor, Swift is something more than human. He has been killed and resurrected, and shares his body with the Blue Angels, whimsical spirits born in the phone lines, created from lost conversations and ignored comments and bounced email, from the energy of modern communication. His unique abilities, urban sorcery and the power of the Blue Angels, mean that he's the only one who can step into dangerous situations and resolve them.

Swift always begins the books uncertain and in peril, pitted against a threat that reveals itself to be overwhelming and nigh undefeatable, with not just his life at stake but invariably also those of millions of other Londoners. By the end of the book, he has, against all odds and with a high body count, managed to neutralize the threat, only to be plunged once again into another seemingly impossible life or death situation at the beginning of the next book. There isn't anything connecting the threats that Swift deals with from book to book, no Sauron or Voldemort, no great evil that must be defeated. The threats are, instead, mostly the result of arbitrary, unpredictable occurrences, some rather amusing in their irreverence, such as, in The Midnight Mayor, the Death of Cities being summoned because of a stolen traffic warden's hat.

There are two problems that make this approach feel somewhat manipulative. The first is the lack of downtime in which the narrator—and the reader—can catch their breath. Instead of ramping up the tension, this begins to have the opposite effect of making things such as the imminent destruction of London seem commonplace and unimportant. This feeling is not abated by Griffin withholding key pieces of information until the end of the book, when she delivers them in reveals that sometimes seem anticlimatic.

The second is that nothing that happens, no matter how disastrous or horrific, seems to have a lasting effect on Matthew Swift.

Between A Madness of Angels and The Neon Court, Swift, to name just a few examples, finds his lover mutilated and driven crazy; sees his apprentice die at the hands of his mentor; kills his mentor; watches the only person he trusts murdered; is made the Midnight Mayor—who comes out at night when the city sleeps, and protects it from magical threats—without his knowledge and is tortured for it. On the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, Swift's score during each book would be in the thousands, and that is without even getting into the matter that Swift has been dead and resurrected and shares his mind and mortal body with previously immortal powers.

And yet, despite these ordeals, the only obvious difference between Swift in A Madness of Angels and Swift in The Neon Court is that the different aspects of him—Blue Angels and resurrected human sorcerer—are more seamlessly integrated in his psyche. And while his experiences leave physical marks, in that Swift seems to spend the majority of each book injured, it soon becomes clear that these will always be temporary. No matter how traumatic the event, there seem to be few long-term emotional consequences or psychological effects for Swift to work through and deal with. In other words, there seems to be nothing very life-changing in the life-changing events that keep happening to him; they seem more like just another day's work, albeit a more exhausting day than most of us have. And while it could be argued that Swift's emotional invulnerability is due to the Blue Angels, this does not seem to be Griffin's intent—it's explicitly stated that Swift's flippancy is a coping mechanism—and in The Neon Court, unlike A Madness of Angels, there is little of the preternatural in him.

The supporting characters carried over from the previous books fare better in this regard, in that they seem very human and vulnerable when compared with the inhuman threats they face and the extraordinary circumstances they deal with. Even Oda, described by Swift as a "psycho-bitch," who in previous books had seemed quite one-dimensional—a fundamentalist and reactionary assassin of the Order, a cult devoted to exterminating magic—is in this book given a heartbreaking backstory, and forced to challenge her beliefs and turn against the Order. The returning supporting characters also seem to have the opposite problem as Swift, in that it is quite likely that by the end of the book, they will become part of the body count.

Unfortunately, the complexity with which Griffin portrays the returning characters doesn't carry over to the new ones.

Near the beginning, Swift sums up the novel's central conflict in a rather clever infodump: "let me get this absolutely clear. The Neon Court—a bunch of narcissistic wankers who haven't yet come to terms with the fact that the age of the Faerie Court is over—have this major league grief with the Tribe, a bunch of self-mutilating wankers who haven't yet come to terms with the fact that the world isn't out to get them personally" (p. 31). This remains all there is to the Court and the Tribe throughout the book, and the flatness of such a characterization makes them feel more like allegories and plot devices than people. Though the conversation between Swift and Toxik, a Tribe Elder, in which Swift tries to convince Toxik to stop the war, and Toxik refuses because war is all the Tribe has, is an exception, it is an exception that proves the rule.

That said, there are a lot of things about this book to recommend it. For one, I've never come across another series that so vividly and dryly captures the chaotic, anarchic mundanity that characterizes a modern city. The book is full of passages like:

I walked through an early-morning Greenwich, a mishmash of old and new: neat white terraces that had, a hundred years ago, housed the genteel citizens of London who couldn't stand the odours of the old city and, a hundred years before that, their naval grandfathers. Yellow-brick council estates thrown up behind the river where the bombs had fallen or the need for housing had grown faster than architectural pride; shops selling electronics from Taiwan, clotted cream from Devon, lampshades from the backyard of a craftswoman in Norfolk and sandwiches produced by their thousands in Sheffield. A red-brick church with patchwork stained glass offered God Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, with judo on Tuesdays, Women's Institute on Thursdays and youth community drama Saturdays, 1-3 p.m. (p. 41)

It soon becomes obvious that London isn't just the setting; it is a character in itself. At the heart of this series lies a love story between Matthew Swift and the city, with magic serving as both an expression of this love and the means of (quite often delightfully bizarre) salvation. In Griffin's universe, urban magic, after all, is nothing more than a certain sense of perspective, the ability to see and fully experience the energies of the city. It is the joy that Matthew Swift takes in his city, how he perceives and embraces all its aspects, from the sublime to the ordinary to the odiferous, that makes him an urban sorcerer.

Another thing that makes reading these books interesting is how they subvert expectations. If you've grown up reading Western fantasy series, as I have, there are certain conventions that crop up so often that the existence of a (conservative, Gnostic) hive mind seems the only explanation. Tropes such as wise, caring mentors that sacrifice themselves for the greater good; prophecies that are invariably fulfilled; magic that exists on a distant plane from joyless, commonplace reality, to which only the possessors of magical ability can escape.

In these worlds, magic is implicitly and explicitly coded as being not just a substitute of money, but a currency against which all others seem like the Zimbabwean dollar in the middle of its hyperinflation spiral, for it is the only thing that gives someone a shot at obtaining happiness. One of the corollaries of this is that those who practice magic are invariably coded as being more privileged.

In this series, however, it soon becomes evident that mentors aren't very wise, and are more likely to cause your death than sacrifice themselves for your sake; rats and pigeons and foxes are magical creatures, with nary a unicorn in sight; prophecies might be nothing more than tools of intrigue and political manipulation; some of the most powerful magic users are figures such as the Beggar King and the Bag Lady; and Matthew Swift, urban sorcerer, despite his ability to con ATMs and credit card machines, is quite decidedly working class. His clothes are secondhand; his main means of transportation are his feet; the only time he enters a restaurant that requires reservations is when someone else is paying for the meal; and he has a working class distrust of those who aren't, a defensiveness arising from the belief that they don't respect him and that he's being taken advantage of (he is right on both counts).

And, perhaps most importantly, the magic in this book is not a means of escape from reality. It is, rather, something that cannot be separated from it, because it is mundane reality that creates it. The magic in these books is relentlessly practical, made of discarded plastic bags and power lines and fare tickets. It is the power of seeing the power in the most ordinary of things; it is the perspective that our mundane reality is not very mundane at all.

So, despite the problems I have with the characterizations in these books, especially when it comes to Swift, and the relentless pace and the repetitive plot, I'm still glad that I picked up this series. Griffin's take on urban magic, and her portrayal of the city of London, are delightful, and the way she continues to subvert common fantasy tropes keeps the books interesting. I just hope that the the next trope she decides to subvert is the necessity of the protagonist saving the world (or, in this case, the city of London) 24/7, and that, in future books, Swift's characterization stops resembling a roly-poly toy.

Guria King lives in the US (and occasionally in other places). Sometimes she writes; most often she procrastinates. For more, visit her blog, Reflections in Transit, or follow her on Twitter.