A Master of Djinn

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-18

Chapters 19-21

Chapters 22-24

Chapters 25-27

Chapter 28-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

The Seal of Sulayman

Signet rings and similar stamps have long served as a method of authenticating documents. Used most often by kings and other aristocrats, signets would be unique to the person possessing them. After writing a document, the user would seal it with hot wax then press their signet into the wax, leaving a mark that they had personally sealed the document. Because of their close association with writing, such seals became associated with magic.

The Seal of Sulayman, a six-pointed star made from overlapping two inverted triangles, is also related to the Star of David, the symbol of the Jewish faith. The seal is not a creation by P. Djeli Clark, but a legendary artifact spoken of in ancient writing. Sulayman is revered in all three Abrahamic religions, bearing a reputation for wisdom, building the First Temple in Jerusalem, and writing the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Sulayman. He is also known in folklore as a powerful magician, capable of capturing and sealing demons and djinn. The magical nature of writing and the power of the seal for authenticity naturally lend themselves to these legends as the tool to do this.

In Clark’s writing, the ring itself seems to have picked up a few qualities from J. R. R. Tolkien’s One Ring. The ring grants its bearer a strong power, but denies its full strength from them. The voice inside, contrary to depictions of Sulayman as wise and kind, tempts the bearer with power, a detail Tolkien himself likely took from depictions of the Christian Satan. Its primary purpose is dominance over others. Losing the ring, which for Tolkien’s Isildur and Frodo and for Clark’s Abigail, involves the loss of the finger or hand wearing it, and in the case of both Abigail Worthington and Tolkien’s Gollum, losing the ring causes its former bearer to have an intense desire to get it back.

The Seal, for both its bad qualities and its good, represents power, mastery, and enslavement. It carries cultural significance for the Middle East, and its appropriation by an English woman mirrors England’s historical tendency to steal important artifacts from their home countries and display them in the British Museum. Ultimately, as shown by comparing how both Fatma and Abigail use the ring, the force of the power is determined entirely by the intentions of its bearer, with Fatma’s abnegation of the ring shown as the wisest option with the most positive consequences.

Clocks

While clocks and clockwork often function as a signifier of steampunk, Clark uses them symbolically. Naturally, they represent time—which is inherent in the genre. A specific variety of retro-futurism, A Master of Djinn shows Earth’s past as if it were a future envisioned by those who lived in the 19th century. Further condensing past and future together, Fatma carries a pocket watch as a memento of her father. The Clock of Worlds stands out as a traumatic moment in her own past; however, the same clock captures the essence of the future for Abigail Worthington, and when she uses it, it sits at the heart of a mechanical colossus, a steampunk-robotic imitation of a giant Ifrit.

Clocks in the novel symbolically collapse both the past and the future into the present. Combined with the themes on slavery and oppression, this reflects Clark’s historical research stating that Black Americans have not gained any social progress, but instead shifted their adversity from one thing to another. Past and present are the same, and the future will likely see problems on par with those currently plaguing them.

The angel’s confounding spell wears thin, as Riwa the bookseller specifies, while clocks are chiming the hour. This sets up a cyclical nature to magic itself, repetitive and renewing, which further presents the image of time being repetitive rather than progressive. This is the weakness in the plan. It prevents the angels from concealing their motives from the humans. Because Fatma discovers the weakness, it prevents Abigail from shifting the balance of world power from Egypt to England. It also forces Fatma to break her promise to the marid djinn, disturbing his sleep in order to renegotiate the spell’s contract—as a representative of a clearly flawed government, this touches on the lack of social progress given to the djinn by the government.

Furthermore, Clark leaves the workings of the Clock of Worlds somewhat vague in this novel, and its primary purpose appears to dissolve the boundaries between parallel dimensions, bleeding different realities together. This may indicate that time is synonymous with space, that everything can be collapsed to a singularity to place an emphasis on the world of the Dead Djinn universe, but it also may suggest that in the same way the events of the story are reaching no clear social progress, the problems from one reality may bleed into others. The forever wars caused by the Nine Lords definitely resonate with recent conflicts such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the racism shown clearly suggests modern problems. The symbolism of the clocks can therefore be interpreted to say that even though the novel presents a fantasy adventure in 1912 Egypt, it bears a strong relationship with American readers in the present day.

The Arabic Language

Arabic is mentioned several times in the novel, beginning early on in Fatma’s investigation. Even though biases and expectations play strongly into the novel, the instances the protagonist displays them herself are rare; this is one exception. Westerners living in Egypt rarely display fluency with the local language, and so when Abigail adopts that as her persona, Fatma doesn’t question it. This assumption throws much of her early investigation; the impostor is seen addressing the slums in Arabic, leaving messages in Arabic written on the walls, and has clearly built up the details of al-Jahiz from reading archived materials in Arabic. Furthermore, the culturally significant One Thousand and One Nights is described several times in the novel as a popular piece of Arabic literature, and The Tales of the Lady Dhat al-Himm, Siwa’s successful tip-off that Abigail, not Alexander, is the culprit, is also in Arabic.

Language in general plays a significant role in the conflict, with the ability to speak—or lack thereof—helping or hindering characters at various points. A character who speaks “broken” Arabic at best would give the same appearance as Siwa slicing off his own tongue to silence him—albeit less gruesome. Arabic, then, plays a role in the novel equal to magic. It gives characters a power over others, or it robs them of it. The sway Abigail holds over the slums’ residents may result in part from her ability to present an illusion, but her control of language, understanding of the culture, and knowing how to tell a crowd exactly what they want to hear give her even more control over them than the literal magic ever does—and certainly during the Trump campaign and presidency and the decades leading up to it, Clark witnessed leaders with the power to enthrall crowds, often with less command of their first language than Abigail Worthington.