★★★★☆ The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, by Jonathan Stroud
An introduction to Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne
The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne
Jonathan Stroud
An introduction to Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne
The title of The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne gives a fairly accurate picture of what the book is about -- it is an introduction to the characters Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne, who are outlaws. Or, at least, Scarlett is -- Albert's status as a lawbreaker is less clear. Scarlett is a standard-issue picaresque -- "a roguish, but appealing hero, usually of low social class, who lives by [her] wits in a corrupt society". She's good with a gun, a knife, and her fists, and skilled at thievery. Albert has other gifts. They live in a postapocalyptic Britain. The exact nature of the apocalypse, which happened centuries before the action of the novel, is never completely spelled out, but whatever it was (one guesses some sort of nuclear cataclysm), it caused elevated mutation rates -- there are now giant otters in England that can gobble up a person, and there are also human mutants, some of them wild and dangerous. Civilization, such as it is, has retreated to walled towns that harshly suppress deviation.
Fleeing a town whose bank she robbed, Scarlett stumbles across an apparently helpless Albert and takes him under her wing. Much of the fun of the novel comes from Scarlett's impatience with Albert's fecklessness. Scarlett was a lot of fun. I didn't really get Albert's character. The problem is that Jonathan Stroud is so occupied with showing his gifts (which I will not spoil) and history that those things rather occlude his personality. Stroud tries -- I think in his mind Albert has a definite and appealing personality -- but it didn't really come clear for me. Scarlett's character, in contrast, appears more clearly. While we are told obliquely that she has a history, that history never gets in the way of depicting who Scarlett is in herself.
I am a Stroud fan, mainly on the basis of his Bartimaeus series, which is a kind of a buddy sorcery story about what eventually becomes an odd-couple friendship between a young sorcerer, Nathaniel, and a demon, Bartimaeus. Stroud's Lockwood & Co series has a somewhat similar structure: there are three buddies rather than two, and they are detectives of the supernatural in London. It seems clear that we are in for an odd-couple outlaw series in the Scarlett and Browne series, and I look forward to it. In fact, I have already bought the second book and will begin reading it today. Can there be a higher recommendation?