A snifter of djinn and tonic

It is now the fate of any author who writes about magic, alternate universes, fantasy or imaginary worlds to be compared to either Tolkien or Rowling, depending on the exact mix of ingredients.

Got dragons, a hero, and evil orc-like creatures? You're a "worthy inheritor of Tolkien's mantle", then. Got imps and wizards instead? You're the author of a book that "will be the next Harry Potter". (Incidentally, the number of future Rowlings out there has crossed into double digits: everyone from Eoin Colfer to Zizou Corder has been saddled with the label.)

It's true that Jonathan Stroud may inhabit roughly the same world that Rowling or Tolkien did, but then that's like saying Naipaul and Marquez are very similar because they have both lived through the same decades.

About the only similarity between The Amulet of Samarkand and the Potter books is that they both deal with magical worlds. That's where the resemblance begins, and thankfully, that's where it ends.

I don't know whether Stephen King had writers like Jonathan Stroud in mind when he exhorted the audience at the NBA ceremony to wake up and smell the coffee, to move out of the ivory tower of "high literature" and see what was happening in other genres, but he should have.

Stroud has a powerful imagination married to a dry but irresistible wit, and the unusual ability to turn out a book that easily straddles the divide between children's writing and adult literature.

The first volume of the Bartimaeus trilogy is set in a London at once familiar and alien, a city that still remembers the magical duel between two of the most powerful wizards of yore, a certain Disraeli and Gladstone. (Gladstone won, if you're wondering!) Ordinary London life goes on, too rushed to notice the world of wizards and djinns lying just beyond the everyday.

The magicians of Stroud's imagination are not quite the dotty old fossils in peculiar dunce caps that we know.

The better ones tend to wear discreet suits, with perhaps a daring tie for variation; the internal politics and feuds of the wizard world are carried out with as much skullduggery, and indeed, many of the same methods, as the skirmishes of the corporate world.

Those who aren't sidetracked by crystals (useless), scrying glasses (usually just for tourists or low-level apprentices) and other kitsch objects of enchantment are here to learn that the road to magic is paved by books, dull lectures and an insistence on correct spelling, that last for very cogent reasons.

As Bartimaeus, a 5,000-year-old djinni, explains, the relationship between magicians and djinns is one of uneasy coexistence.

Magicians can bind a djinn by the use of spells, and derive almost all their power from djinns, imps and lesser denizens of the paranormal world; djinns, on the other hand, are always on the alert for mistakes made by their masters, where a drawing error in a pentagram could mean the disappearance of a magician in a plume of smoke.

It requires power and control to summon up a djinn (or an afrit, for that matter), which is why Bartimaeus is understandably irritaed to discover that the great and powerful sorcerer who has summoned him from the outer darkness is a 12-year-old apprentice on the scrawny side.

In the hands of a lesser talent, the apprentice would have either become the quintessential hero figure, or turned into yet another avatar of Harry Potter.

Stroud is too clever to do this, though, and what he creates in Nathaniel is a portrait of a lonely, talented boy struggling to discover his own potential even as he forges an unlikely relationship with The Enemy.

Nathaniel will make grievous errors and pay for them in grievous coin; like any small boy, he can be taunted; he is not always a nice person, driven by revenge and a powerful ego as much as by a genuine sense of grievance.

The morality that underpins this fictional London is far more ruthless than either the schoolboy good-versus-bad reasoning of the Potter series or the complex, but heavily neo-Christian philosophy of Philip Pullman's fantasy saga.

This is a world of cut-throat bargains, where the balance of power matters a great deal, where good and evil aren't as important as your ability to duck at the right time.

The amulet of the title is a powerful tool, but like all objects of great power, it must be used correctly, or else.

It's when both Nathaniel and Bartimaeus discover the beginnings of an uneasy friendship, or must combat the stirrings of unwelcome but finer feelings, that the narrative really acquires force, not to mention black humour.

And then there's the footnotes, delivered in Stroud's deadpan style: "The Indefinite Confinement spell is a bad 'un, and one of the worst threats magicians can make. You can be trapped for centuries in horrid minute spaces and, to cap it all, some of them are just plain daft. Matchboxes, bottles, handbags...I even knew a djinni once who was imprisoned in a dirty old lamp."

This has to be said: while TheAmulet of Samarkand delivers in terms of a complex plot, interesting creatures, and a more than plausible story, where it really scores is in the creative use of irony.

This is a gently subversive take on ye olde worlde of magick, where djinn fights djinn, where the list of magicians who muffed their lines with horrible consequences include J Faust, where one of the problems about changing form is that djinns-turned-pigeons are subject to the amorous advances of other members of the feathered sex.

Bartimaeus is a wickedly amoral narrator; Nathaniel a brat with unsuspected depths. The rest of you can hang around waiting for the next installment in the Potter saga "" I hear that volumes two and three of the Bartimaeus trilogy should hit the stands far sooner.

THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND

Jonathan Stroud
Doubleday
Pages: 480
Price: £9.99