A Discovery of Witches [Hardcover]

I really, really wanted to like this book.

I thought Twilight was utterly appalling, so when I saw the review on the cover of this book that said something along the lines of "The thinking person's Twilight", I thought, hurray!! An intelligent, well-plotted, well-characterised fantasy with elements of a supernatural romance - just the thing for cold evenings by the fire. Sadly, I don't feel that the book really delivered on any of these fronts. The premise seemed interesting - a mysterious manuscript that supernatural creatures want to get their hands on is called up by the novel's heroine, a witch named Diana. A dishy vampire - the hero, Matthew - sees the danger she is in and decides to get involved. The location (Oxford) is well-described, and the reader gets a nice sense of settling in for a meaty read.

Sadly, nothing much really happens. Diana spends a lot of her time going running and rowing on the river while Matthew eyes her beadily from the banks. At this point, he starts to tell her how extraordinarily brave she is to be carrying on as though there were no danger. He continues to be amazed by her courage throughout the book. I get the impression that we, the readers, are supposed to think that Diana is terribly brave too, though really it's more like she's just oblivious to the strange turn her life is taking.

She drinks enormous amounts of tea. Every time she puts on the kettle (and spoons the tea into a pot and warms her hands on the hot mug and sips at the soothing, fragrant brew), the experience is lovingly detailed for us. I began to think that tea was going to turn out to be a major plot-device, and that perhaps the action would centre around some sort of ancient tea-leaf feud, but no.

Then there is the yoga. I'm not sure why I found this so jarring. I tried to accept that, within the world of this novel, yoga would be be a perfectly normal hobby for witches, daemons and vampires but it just seemed odd. Diana is being threatened by a host of other-worldly creatures, and strong, mysterious Matthew is deeply concerned for her safety so, to relax, the two of them put their yoga mats into Matthew's car and drive off to an "inclusive" yoga class, in which other-worldly creatures put aside their differences and fold themselves into downward-facing-dogs and sun salutations (quite lengthy descriptions of the various postures and movements, and how it felt to do them, are given). I recognise that authors may create their worlds as they wish but this still felt incongruous to me.

Then there is the fact that we are told, time and time again, that Diana is brave, that she is strong, that she is a capable, independent woman. Sadly, and very like Bella in Twilight, once the alpha-male vampire appears on the scene, she is reduced to someone that just needs to be protected. Matthew is constantly ordering her to go to bed, carrying her up the stairs, wrapping her in blankets, propping her up before the fire and telling her exactly what she may or may not do. When she is not drinking tea, in fact, she seems to be permanently in a state of exhaustion - sometimes only a couple of hours after an enormous sleep, she's worn out again - and this seems to be used as a vehicle for her man literally to sweep her off her feet and tuck her into bed again, while looking adoringly at her and telling her what a feisty, strong and stubborn creature she is. I don't really understand what their deep and abiding love is based on, either. There is no sexual tension or chemistry to speak of. The fact that Matthew treats Diana more like a sickly child than anything else doesn't help. There is kissing, but not as much as there is sleeping, enfolded in manly arms, soothed by a strong and manly presence.

Despite all of this, and somewhat to my own surprise, I didn't hate this book.

This is probably only because, truth be told, I rather like descriptions of food and drink and gothic places (luckily, in this case), so I didn't find the novel quite as tedious as its lack of action deserved. Nothing much happens and I really don't like either of the main characters much, but the cosy images of meals and fires and old castles and quirky houses were enough to get me through to the end - just about. Ideally, the food et al would be coupled with some real plotting and interesting personalities, a female lead who isn't a droopy-drawers and a male lead who isn't an aggressive, over-protective know-all. In this day and age, are we really supposed to be into this image of how relationships should be?

I'm torn between giving two stars and three for this book, so I'll err on the side of generosity! I won't be buying the sequel, though.

I will try to begin on a positive, and with the one good thing that I was able to take away from the feat of endurance that constituted reading this novel: if this can get published, and onto the NYT Bestsellers List, then if my own career goes belly-up I can always become a novelist, because I surely could do no worse than this. This book is bad, folks. Really astonishingly, befuddlingly, car-crash bad.
Where to begin? On the cover it implies 'if you like Twilight then you'll love this'. Now no-one will pretend that the Twilight series is great literature, but it has been astonishingly successful, because it combines an enjoyable, vampire-filled escapist world with 'teenage girl wish fulfilment'. A Discovery of Witches is presumably attempting to cash in by doing much the same, but trying to substitute 'teenage girl wish fulfilment' for '30-something middle-class woman wish fulfilment'. Which leads onto a 1000 year old supposedly-dangerous, predatory vampire taking the heroine, Diana Bishop, on a date to, er....yoga. With the yoga mat he keeps in his car. Naturally our vampire hero, Matthew, is also a dab hand at horse-riding, speaking romantic French and wine-tasting. Presumably to complete the picture of an ideal vampire lover for a middle class lady he is also a member of a Book Club, but there wasn't enough space to write the meetings in. Menacing, dangerous and unpredictable? I've felt more bloodsucking menace while watching Count Von Count on Sesame Street.
In keeping with the sub-Mills and Boon romance, we are also treated to a paragraph describing what the heroine wears on every single day, irrelevant and uninteresting though this is (it's usually black leggings, fashion fans) and truly cliched attempts at making Diana seem like the average woman, with references to her 'unruly hair' and troublesome relatives.
But the major flaws run deeper than this. This is, after all, supposed to be a bit of escapism - even the author wouldn't claim that it was written with the intention of winning any literary prizes, but one of the secrets of writing a bit of escapism involving vampires, witches and daemons is that your created world must be consistent and seem at least semi-plausible, and here Harkness fails utterly. As the novel goes on more and more concepts are chucked piecemeal at this world, seemingly culled from any popular series going, from Harry Potter to Twilight. We are initially given a world in which humans co-exist with 'creatures' who remain hidden to them, but as we go on, talking ghosts, time travel, talking animals, magic with seemingly no boundaries and living inanimate objects are added to the mix so that the overriding impression is of a world made up by the author as she went along, with no internal consistency or rules whatsoever. Thus, by about 75% of the way through the reader is exasperated and any sense of belief in the world created has vanished. This is not of course helped by the characters, who themselves seem to vary in personality from one chapter to the next, and who are given creaking lines of expositional dialogue that at times actually make the reader laugh out loud with the sheer implausibility of anyone actually saying them. The central romance runs from the characters meeting to becoming lifelong soulmates without much in the way of explaining how this happens. Perhaps Harkness feels she doesn't have to.
And last, because I could write so much more but am losing the will to live, the plot. First, concepts such as 'show don't tell' and 'expounding plot points later rather than immediately' seem entirely alien concepts to Harkness. Every event is elaborated on straight away, no secrets are left for the reader to feel curious about and again the prevailing feel is of a novel written 100% on the hoof, events at the start bearing little relation to events by the conclusion. Perhaps most importantly, there is no sense of this being a stand-alone novel - it is intended to be one of a trilogy, but absolutely no resolution to the 43 chapters of successive almost random-feeling events is achieved by the end. In fact feel free to stop reading at any point, as you will achieve as much resolution as you will at the designated end, and will give yourself free time to do things other than read this appalling drivel. In summary: I regret the time wasted reading this sorry excuse of a book, and would implore anyone who does not actively enjoy masochism to look elsewhere. Anywhere.

Having spent months of my life reading this utter drivel I decided to write a review. Without a doubt the most pathetic excuse of a main character ever and to boot dull, dull, dull ramblings of a supposed strong heroine. Matthew the vampire is also dull and one dimensional and it just goes on and on and on and on...I won't be seeing the movie if one is ever made!