I really wanted to give this 4 and a half stars or something. It's well written, the settings and characters and general mythological flow are lovely and original (inspired by the mysterious names of London landmarks and subway, excuse me, Underground, stations (and isn't that word, Underground, pretty inspiring itself, in retrospect?)), and overall it's rich and wonder-filled.

So why only four stars? Because amidst all the wonderfulness it's actually sort of simple, sort of easy, sort of edgeless. Our hero accomplishes great things that no one has been able to do for millennia by basically being a nice guy. The bad guys are all bad, the good guys are all good. There is the standard twist where you find out that one entity you thought was good is actually bad, and another where that happens, but then the entity in question becomes good again through self-sacrifice. At the end it turns out that a fantasy world made up by the author is better than reality (never a big surprise!). There is no acknowledgment that life is actually about tradeoffs, that most people are somewhat good and somewhat bad, etc.

Which isn't to say that it's bad, only that, with the general skill the author displays in storytelling, it could have been better. I still enjoyed it very much, and don't at all regret the time spent reading it. It's a fascinating world to have visited.