The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar

I had two ways I could start with this novel, but then I realized they were both complaints. I could note the reason I originally picked it up was an introduction by Neil Gaiman, which seemed like a positive thing in 2006 when this edition was published and in 2012 when I bought it. (But is no longer.) Or I could mention that this 1992 novel's US edition gives it a 2006 copyright date, and that sloppiness seems to extend to a lot of the events and actions in the book, which don't always seem to happen exactly in the right order or for adequate reasons.

The first is a shrug: what can you do? The second is more central: I think The Good Fairies of New York needed a good structural edit back in 1992 to tweak and tighten it, tie up some loose ends, and rein in author Martin Millar's tendency to write lots of short scenes that are individually fun and zippy but don't necessarily follow from each other or move his narrative forward.

On the other hand, Good Fairies is a comic fantasy, and that style makes it funny and quick and engaging - for readers who aren't thinking deeply about continuity and "wait, how did that happen?" in particular, which I think is a good description of the core audience for British funny fantasy.

This is a novel about New York by a Scotsman who lives in London, and it lives up to most of the stereotypes that you are likely to be wondering about right now. It does have Scots fairies, who are musically-gifted, hair-tempered little punkers and get the most in-depth characterization in the book, which is not saying very much. The New York they wander through is cartoonish, one part generic big city and one part US-melting-pot-of-immigrants as seen by a foreigner who doesn't quite get what that means to locals. It has a plot that is not as complex as it might seem, but is full of complication, as Millar runs through the same few McGuffins repeatedly.

So, our main ingredients are:

• Morag MacPherson and Heather MacKintosh, those two Scottish fairies, who appear suddenly in an Alphabet City apartment and vomit on the carpet. They're fleeing the Scottish fairy authorities for reasons both specific (they damaged a priceless heirloom of another clan) and general (they cause trouble and fight everywhere they go).
• Dinnie MacKintosh, the fat and unpleasant young man whose apartment they landed in. Heather ends up sticking with him when Morag and Heather inevitably fight after a few pages.
• Kerry, a young woman with Crohn's disease who lives right across the street. She wants to win a local arts competition with her Celtic floral alphabet, the creation of which entails a lot of small fetch quests and the centerpiece flower of which is the biggest and most mobile McGuffin of the book. Morag befriends her after the two fairies split.
• Magenta, a crazy bag lady who thinks she's general of the Greek forces against the Persians, and is actually being pursed by a homeless guy named Joshua, because she stole his formula for a magic potion. She mostly exists to facilitate multiple shifts in ownership of the McGuffin flower.
• Petal and Tulip, the heirs to the fairy king of Cornwall, in exile due to political turmoil at home and accompanied by three Irish fairies - Brannoc and Maeve and Padraig - I think mostly so Millar can make some pan-Celtic jokes and stereotypes that went over my head.
• Cal, Kerry's ex, who runs a theatre downstairs from Dinnie and could have been a major antagonist if he ever showed up on the page. He's entering a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the arts contest, and is assumed to be Kerry's major competition there.
• Tala, the king of the fairies of Cornwall, who has instituted an unpleasant factory-town capitalism, which led both to his aforementioned heirs fleeing and to....
• the Cornish Fairy Resistance Movement, led by Aelric, whose characterization is limited to a passion for the king's stepdaughter and a zeal for distributing handbills.
• Johnny Thunders, the dead guitarist for the New York Dolls, who is in New York in ghostly form, having hitched a ride with Chinese ghosts coming for the Hungry Ghost Festival. He wants to get his favorite guitar back. He does not.

There are also, eventually, local clans of New York fairies - Italian and Chinese and Ghanaian - who Morag and/or Heather steal from and piss off and eventually charm.

There is a lot of running about. Dinnie wants to date Kerry, and the two fairies each try to facilitate that for different reasons. Scottish fairy hunters (hunters who are fairies and who also hunt fairies) arrive to capture Morag and Heather to bring them back for punishment for their various crimes back home. A mercenary force from Cornwall arrives and almost immediately leaves for inadequate reasons. At the climax, a massive Cornish fairy army invades, setting up for a grand-scale battle against the combined forces of the rebels, all of the New York fairy clans, and probably the Greek hoplites too....which then fizzles and doesn't happen.

On the positive side, Millar writes very amusing sentences and paragraphs and scenes. Every little bit of Good Fairies is fun, but all of the bits don't quite cohere into a single overall narrative, which is a bit disappointing.