A Discovery of Witches: Deborah Harkness

Diana is not just a preeminent scholar of medical history; she is also a witch. As it turns out, she is the daughter of two talented witches, and possibly a ridiculously powerful witch herself. But since her parents were killed when she was young, Diana has shunned her power, choosing instead to focus on academics: a place where her magic could be helpful, for all that she puts it aside.

As Diana is spending a sabbatical in Oxford, searching old manuscripts for alchemical illustrations, she comes upon a strange book: the Ashmole 782, a mysterious manuscript that has been palimpsested with another's magical touch. But from the second she returns the book, long thought to be lost, her life is filled with unwelcome people: the witches, vampires, and daemons all come to find her, watch her, follow her, waiting for her to call back the book.

Into this repressive shadowing comes Matthew, a research doctor and himself an old, old vampire. He too is seeking the Ashmole 782, but is just as interested in the powerful witch who denies her power. As his research may be dependent on not only the book but also Diana herself, the two grow closer, first in the environs of Oxford before fleeing to the safety of his family in France, and finally to Diana's own home in Massachusetts. Not only have they uncovered a secret, but they have also fallen in love, and in doing so disturbed the equilibrium that a secret society of witches, vampires, and daemons have long kept stable.

There's so much to think will be intriguing about this, right? Then why is it that I was more or less unimpressed by this?

A lot of this has to do with Diana. Never before has there ever been a witch so powerful, or a person more perfect. She's a genius academic! She's an avid rower! And jogger! And advanced yoga practitioner! Also a very talented actress! And did I mention that she's great with horses? I think it's the last one that really got me: how often have we come upon a romance heroine who is either practically magical with horses, despite having never been near one or because of having been raised with the best stable in Kentucky? Seriously, I had a big eye-roll when horses came into the picture.

There's also a lot of circular justifications in the love story: We are in love, because we love each other. Suddenly it was inevitable that we love each other. To be honest, I wasn't particularly expecting this to be a love story, more perhaps Possession with extra added occult, and to be fair I wouldn't categorize this as a romance as it's missing a lot of the elements of a romance genre novel. But it's a love story, and it's a love story with a lot of reiteration. We are in love, because we love each other.

And a lot of this loving each other got in the way of the plot. Perhaps it has to do with expectations, as I went into this thinking A.S. Byatt and didn't get nearly that level of intellegesia interaction. I probably should have been warned by the cover blurb, wherein the Sunday Times maintained that A Discovery of Witches will be "...irresistible to Twilight fans." Honestly, by the end, I thought we were a bit more in Outlander territory, a novel which, for the record, I hated.

All this sounds rather negative, and yes, that's because it is, but what my feelings about this book boil down to are a rather neutral: "Yeah, it's all right." If someone asked me for one sentence on it, that's what I'd probably come up with. Despite getting rather regularly annoyed with Diana and feeling like the love story was by turns slightly creepy and then just repetitive, I'm interested in this world that Harkness has built. I love the idea of witches, vampires, and daemons living among us, each suited to particular facets and careers of modern life. I'm not so much into this secret society conspiracy thing, but the individual places that are carefully crafted - Oxford, Occitania, Massachusetts - give a pretty frame to the action, a frame that's just as important and interesting as the action itself. It makes me wonder what the author is going to do in the rest of the trilogy, especially by the end of A Discovery of Witches when the reader is dropped into the next world that Diana and Matthew will visit. And frankly, the news that this has been picked up by Warner Bros. for a film adaptation is very welcome. I think it'll make a fine and rich film, if done well, and one that I'll line up to see, first run, full price. That's an unusual thing on a grad school budget.

In the end it's difficult to feel anything particularly passionate about A Discovery of Witches. It's a strange bird, a novel where I think the really rather promising plot is actually rather disserved by the distracting love story, and frankly, the perfect protagonists are a bit much. But my interest is piqued. The world is interesting, even if some of its characters are not, and in the next book of the trilogy we get to see our wonderful protagonists in another time and place. I'm not made of stone: when Shadow of Night is released next summer, I'll get in line at the library and duly try to find out if our faithful protagonists find what they need.