The Man With The Golden Torc

The Man With The Golden Torc by Simon Green

Eddie Drood is a part of the Drood clan, a secretive and insular family that operate outside of the normal boundaries of law and society in order to protect it from the forces of darkness and evil.  They each have a torc, a golden necklace that can be transformed into a full suit of armour when the correct words are vocalised.  It prevents them from coming to harm and also conceals their identity – Eddie’s friends know him as Shaman Bond, a low-level player in the shadowy magical scene.  When his family inexplicably turn on him and make his identity public, Eddie has to seek shelter from some of the more unsavoury elements of their society – The Chelsea Lovers, the Sceneshifters and the Middle Man.  And when they can’t help him figure out what went wrong, he turns to the infamous Molly Metcalf.  There are rumours about Molly: she abducts aliens to run strange experiments on them; she once frightened a ghost out of the house it was haunting; she called up the Devil just to tell him a stream of knock-knock jokes.  She’s an enemy of the Drood family and everything it stands for, but when the Droods are hunting Eddie down with a deadly fervour, Molly’s just what he needs: a witch with plenty of reasons to bring the Droods down.

I should start by saying that I’m a huge, huge fan of Simon Green’s work.  I borrowed most of the Nightside series from my friend Cheryl and it kept me going through many tedious hours at a temp job after uni.  Green writes in an unputdownable way – it’s difficult to do anything else whilst reading one of his books, especially work.  Luckily for me, I picked this one up during a week off work and was ok to spend the day in my pyjamas, doing nothing but reading.  T’was heaven.

In a lot of ways, this is a typical Simon Green book.  It has the dark sense of humour, the obvious love of London, a set of strange and semi-mythical enemies and weapons as well as characters with some of the most fantastic names I’ve come across:  The Karma Catechist; Janissary Jane; Charlatan Joe; the Blue Fairy; Subway Sue; Mr Stab.  He interlaces people and objects that are important or relevant with those who clearly just tickle his fancy.  If anything, it’s this tendency that’s the weakness of the book.  There’s no real need to have Eddie visit a variety of his family’s enemies before deciding to speak to someone who has actual information that might be useful and reading it feels a bit like treading water – not really a waste of time, but certainly not getting you anywhere.

Whilst the title, the Bond pseudonym and the heap of gadgets available from the Armourer might suggest this is a riff on the spy novel, that’s about as far as it goes.  In most other ways, this is very much a Simon R Green novel, albeit one that clearly took its prompt from the idea of having a Q-esque character provide awesome toys for any situation.  I drank this up in one sitting, but it wasn’t the most satisfying Simon Green read I’ve ever had.  Still awesome, mind.

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