In addition to his constant sarcasm, wit and desire to kill the ‘hero’ throughout the book, he adds his own little ‘footnotes’ at the end of every other page or so. What makes this series different and as thoroughly enjoyable as it is, has to be the character of Bartimaeus. So Bartimaeus is trapped in this world until he fulfils Nathanial’s demands ‘still a powerful object from the sorcerer that embarrassed him’. Upon becoming a trainee, magician names are changed because the vast number of evil spells that can affect you require your original name.

Fortunately, for Nathaniel, Bartimaeus does not know his ‘real’ name. In fact, he quite openly tells Nathanial that if he could he would kill him on the spot. This unworthy magician, Nathaniel, has summoned Bartimaeus in order to exact revenue upon a sorcerer who has embarrassed and made a fool of him in front of his master.īartimaeus, who was quite enjoying his time relaxing within his own dimension, is not at all happy about this summoning. In the first book, The Amulet of Samarkand, we meet Bartimaeus, an evil, sarcastic Djinni (basically a demon) summoned to this world from his dimension by what he considers an unworthy magician. The Bartimaeus Trilogy gives us perhaps one of the most original characters and means of expressing that character’s point of view since the genres birth. That is not to say it is not original though. It is a story of revenge and the journey to achieving it. Where as hardcore fantasy readers may struggle with Harry Potter, they would find that The Bartimaeus Trilogy is far more suited to the accepted conventions. I would say though that these books are far more your typical fantasy novel than the Harry Potter stories. It certainly isn’t a huge leap from one to the other in the sense that there is magic, mystery, loveable characters, comedy and page turning storylines. The Bartimaeus Trilogy was a series pushed heavily at the time Harry Potter’s popularity exploded.

The bartimaeus