It's been a good while since I read the first book in this series, but I didn't have too many difficulties picking things up. This really is the far side of the world from Alan Garner's increasingly atmospheric and enigmatic style of fantasy. This is a sturdy, intricate piece of world-building, fully grounded and downright anti-romantic in its, for a narrow sense of the word, realism. There's the geography, all connected, the flora, the fauna, the city, the academic extension to the city, the economics, the politics, the corruption and crime and bustling throng of diverse species, there the mad science that's indistinguishable from magic and here's danger, madness and death - often hideous and bloody - around every corner: basically it's Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar and Jack Vance's Dying Earth and you could probably talk knowingly about George RR Martin for kids if you really wanted to.

Some really quite amazingly horrible stuff happens in the course of this adventure. There's is intrigue and betrayal, but there are deaths and murders and mutilations that were either shocking or gratifying in a book for children, I'm not sure which, and it's probably both. The writing makes sure it all goes down easily, however - a tad too easily, perhaps. One is invested in the world and in the story, but never quite the characters. The kind of smooth clarity of the prose that explains complex ideas and gruesome deaths with deceptive simplicity tends to describe characters and their emotions and personalities without ever quite making them really come alive to the reader.

Not that that'll stop me sailing off into the next one.