Mention “magical fantasy” to some readers, and you’ll see them physically recoil. At best, they regard it jejune, ill-written trash – at worst, the fictive analogue of rectal sigmoidoscopy. While A Darker Shade of Magic is unlikely to erase such preconceptions outright, it might just induce them to wobble. (A bit.) The author, V.E. (Victoria) Schwab, is an Acclaimed New Talent (per the lengthy blurb that spans the jacket, inside and out): an American writer with a British mother, and obvious Anglophile leanings, she’s apparently already published one novel (Vicious, a dark superhero yarn) with some success. She’s also, damn her eyes, secured the talents of a film agent, which I suppose means we can look forward to future CGI-fests based on her work; good news for Vicky, no doubt, though how her books will translate to the screen remains to be seen. On the evidence of A Darker Shade of Magic, I predict chiselled cheekbones, flowing hair and much romantic angst – plus a fair bit of gory (but not TOO gory) action, certain to push the boundaries of the 12A certificate. Am I jealous of Vicky’s success, her skilful knack of tapping the pulse of the reading public with a thrilling page-turner blending SF and fantasy with a snappy fresh take on magical warfare, wowing the critics with her “gorgeous” prose? Why, no. Not a bit. Me? No, really…

The novel takes place in an imagined past, spanning three alternate dimensions, each containing a city called London: Grey London, Red London, and White London. Grey London roughly corresponds to “our” reality, at the time of George III: a drab world, largely devoid of magic, populated by vagabonds and toffs. Red London – where most of the story takes place – is a rich and colourful world, whose inhabitants all practice some level of magic as a matter of course. And White London takes magic to dangerous extremes: a wintry land bled almost completely of colour, full of cunning and deceit, ruled by power-hungry twins Astrid and Athos Dane. Our main protagonist is Kell, a blood-magician from Red London, adopted by the royal family and raised as their own. He’s one of only two surviving members of the Antari race, super-sorcerers with one normal eye and one completely black; only Antari can cross between the dimensions, and travel to the alternate Londons. The other Antari is Holland, sinister henchman of the White London Danes, with powers perhaps even stronger than Kell’s.

There’s another London, incidentally – or at least, there was: Black London, a world whose people became so obsessed by magic that it literally consumed them. To save the other Londons, magical barriers were erected between the dimensions, and artefacts from Black London were hunted and destroyed. But one, it seems, has survived the purge: a mysterious black stone, able to gift the user with unimaginable powers. With every use, the stone possesses a little more of the user… Delivered to Kell by subterfuge, the stone sparks a deadly pursuit across the dimensions, with the magician picking up a feisty sidekick from Grey London along the way: the tomboyish Lila, cut-purse and wannabe pirate, and an orphan like Kell. (A further ocular similarity – she has one “normal” eye, and one made of glass – will no doubt be explored in later books in the series.)

A Darker Shade of Magic is a painless read, with Schwab handling the seemingly endless proliferation of backstories quite deftly. Reviewers have been wowed by her prose style, which is admittedly better than the norm, though hardly up to the standards of, say, Hilary Mantel or Sarah Waters; elegant but unshowy, it favours the pithy soundbite a trifle too much for my taste, but is otherwise well-crafted. The text contains a few spelling errors (“sewn” for “sown”, “broach” for “brooch”), anachronisms (“okay”) and jarring Americanisms (“gotten” being the most forgivable, technically an example of archaic English), but is otherwise fluid, fast-paced and artfully-constructed. It’s well-written enough, in fact, to disguise the fact that it’s wholly superficial; seekers of subtexts will find their quest a fruitless one, though perhaps that’s an unfair observation. One doesn’t look to a Bond film for Bergmanesque depth, after all, and Schwab’s main readership certainly seems happy with less. They say it’s more, after all (even if, in this case, they’re wrong). But for all my sarky faint praise, the book is a more-than-decent effort with a clever core concept its author will surely exploit to the hilt: expect sequels, spinoffs, franchises galore. So, congrats, Vicky.I don’t begrudge you a bit of it. No. No, really…