Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(4)

But the most meaningful true-to-New York thing of all is the way the city is such a compelling, uncanny beast and forces Clary to adapt. This is why, despite the titles, Clary Fray’s story isn’t about the hidden cities of bones, of ashes, of glass. Her story is about New York, and about a girl finding her place in it and learning to love and trust it again even though it has kept so much hidden from her. At least that’s how it seems to me, someone who loves cities and towns and who, when she first moved to New York City, wanted so desperately to love it but had to learn its true character, find its hidden charms, and accept its all-too-visible flaws before she could walk comfortably through it, to say nothing of finding its hidden beauty and mystery.

Clary’s New York is both the one she grew up in and the one she didn’t know existed and yet can’t unsee or deny. Mundane New York or Shadowhunter New York, it’s always her New York, and not simply because, by birth, she has a key part to play in the intrigues of the Nephilim. It’s her New York because Clary identifies strongly with it. It’s where she grew up and where she lives. Even if escaping its newfound strangeness were as simple as moving away—and it isn’t, nor is it generally that simple in real life—that isn’t an option, because Clary loves her home and goes on loving it even as it reveals itself to be something different from what she had always assumed it to be. Places, like people, are complex, and loving them isn’t simple.

Of course, it isn’t just New York that she must adjust to as she begins to see through the glamours that have been hiding reality from her for her entire life. As the proverbial scales begin to fall from her eyes, she realizes she has been blind to certain details about her own mother, and not just the past Jocelyn Fray hid from her. Even her mother’s skin bears the scars of her early life, a detail that Clary has never noticed due to the elaborate spells that kept her from seeing the stranger world around her.

Then again, I suppose I always assume people are hiding parts of themselves from each other. People do that. Perhaps, then, it isn’t particularly odd that all the family drama in the books never seems as big a deal to me as the shifting nature of the city, the things it hides and the things it chooses to reveal.




When I moved to New York City in 2001, it was unhomely in every sense. My apartment was a good home to come back to, and I loved it and I loved my roommate and I loved the neighborhood we’d chosen, but the city itself was frustrating, strange, and unwelcoming. I’d grown up in a rural suburb of Annapolis and I’d gone to school in bucolic, mostly rural upstate New York, but the city just being different from what I was accustomed to didn’t explain what I was feeling. I’d lived in London, I’d been lost in Venice, I’d traveled alone in France and Spain, and I was about as self-sufficient as anyone I knew. And yet. It was almost as if the city were trying to knock me down a few pegs, trying for some reason to break me. It made me cry more than I was comfortable with. It made me want to move home to Maryland.

I don’t really remember when I started to want to fight back. I don’t even remember whether that’s really how I looked at it. The way I remember it was that I started looking for evidence that this city wasn’t what it had first shown itself to be. I started looking for what it was hiding under the indifferent, hurried, even cruel face it seemed intent on putting on for me. I started grasping at moments that weren’t misery. Slowly, slowly, I found them. And at some point along the way, New York City began to feel like home.

Then, some time after that, New York began to change for me once more. Having found its homely side at last, I let myself open my eyes again to the unhomely, this time looking for the other hidden face of the city, its quirks and oddities and bits of delightful weirdness. When I’d been sure the city was out to get me, these things would have been lumped in with the things that made New York seem unknowable and sinister. Now, though, I discover those things and am fascinated by them without feeling that they make the city not like home. It takes looking around you with a certain type of eye, though. You have to be willing to walk down an alley just because of the interesting ironwork on the fire escapes. It has to occur to you to look under an awning to see the decades-old sign beneath, a treasure hidden (almost) in plain view. You have to be willing to look up occasionally, a thing that, in New York, where so much is going on at eye level, sometimes takes conscious effort to remember to do.

You have to force yourself to give things more than a passing glance. You have to look at a thing long enough for it to really show itself to you—a skill Clary has to learn in order to see past the glamours masking things all around her. “Let your mind relax,” Jace instructs when trying to help Clary see a rune on his hand. “Wait for it to come to you. Like waiting for something to rise to the surface of water.” Staring at the stronghold masquerading as an abandoned hospital on Roosevelt Island, Clary tries “to stare around the lights, or through them, the way you could sometimes look past a thin topcoat of paint to see what was underneath” (City of Bones). Seeing past the glamour—past the superficial—takes effort, but it’s a critical step Clary has to take in order to reconcile what she has been seeing with what’s really there and to walk confidently through the city she thought was home as something more than an interloper. It’s the only way she can learn to navigate the once-familiar streets without getting lost, and without being afraid.