ETA: Cracked the code! I'll write another post with hints tomorrow. Confidential to Mr. Harkaway: a patch of ice, eh? A likely story.
Nick Harkaway is back with another
satisfyingly-unclassifiable, broadly-scoped-but-detail-conscious,
avert-the-apocalypse novel to follow his first,
The Gone-Away World. That's not
to say that one follows the other - they're independent stories - but there is
a curious reappearance of maroon Rolls-Royces and a peculiar focus on bees
(which had a passing role in The Gone-Away World but feature much more
prominently here). I tried hard to read this book without thinking of The
Gone-Away World, because the two have nothing to do with each other, but it was
difficult. I will admit freely that The Gone-Away World was and is one of my
top two favorite books, so any sophomore novel of Harkaway's has to fill big
shoes from my perspective. I'm going to try to review Angelmaker on its own, but
I'll put some comparisons in at the end, because I think it makes for
interesting speculation.
Once again, I can't really tell you what this book is about.
Most prominently, there's Joe Spork, son of a flashy gangster of ill repute,
who emphatically does not want to follow in his father's shoes, even while
inheriting his socks. There's the indefatigable Polly Cradle and her unique
fascination with the timing of certain British train lines. There's a horrendously
ugly dog who gets carted about (most of the time) by the unlikeliest, most interesting
female protagonist of the past (and next?) ten years, Edie Banister. There's a
train called the
Ada Lovelace (!) and a baby war elephant with rather opportune
timing. Most importantly, there's a plot to destroy the world, leveraged by a caricature
of a villain (who is nonetheless absolutely deadly and as timeless as
Enoch Root)
and enabled by Joe Spork's brilliant and achingly sympathetic erstwhile
grandmother. And of course, the bees. (It's here that I want to interject, "But
wait! I haven't even mentioned the Book, or the veiled monk-like
techno-cultists, or the kelp-armored submarine!" Suffice it to say that
this book is difficult to sum up, and that it will all come out in the wash.)
It took me 104 pages to stop worrying that Harkaway had
grown up so much that he had written exactly the type of book that made me hate
High Fidelity so much: the kind with a single, male
protagonist in his one-third life crisis who aspires to abide by the law, and complains
because he doesn't lead an exciting life of crime and gangsters.
See quote:
"This day is the pattern of his life. He is the man who
arrives too late. Too late for clockwork in its prime, too late to be a
gentleman crook, too late to know his grandmother. Too late to be admitted to
the secret places, too late really to enjoy his mother's affection before it
slid away into a God-ridden gloom. And too late for whatever revelation was
waiting here. He had allowed himself to believe that there might, at last, be a
wonder in the world which was intended just for him. Foolishness." p. 85
It takes a train (several trains - chemical transport ones)
and an attractive set of toes to do it, but Joe Spork stops resembling
Rob Gordon at some point (thank god). The change (not the one at the end - I won't
say anything more about that one) is distinct enough that I wonder if
mealy-mouthed Joe Spork of pages 1-103 is a purposeful ruse that Harkaway put
out to throw people like me off their guard. I'm dubious about that notion,
though. It feels more like he's trying to write a different type of book, and
slips sort of inevitably into his natural style somewhere along the way. Again,
thank god.
So Joe Spork is dragged, increasingly-less-reluctantly into
a world that seems to be going to hell in a bad way, and somehow he's the one
to spearhead the operation to save it. We bounce back and forth for a while
between Joe's modern-day escapades and Edie Banister's prior ones. I will say
that this book cannot possibly have enough of Edie Banister. She's just the
right balance of feisty and no-nonsense and relatably human. The most achingly
poignant scenes in the book happen when she, right along with us, tries to
figure out the enigmatic and impossibly brilliant Frankie, and coming up short.
I haven't read the Edie Banister short story, but it's on my to-do list this weekend.
I tend to find myself utterly devoted to Harkaway's characters. They're at once
larger-than-life and utterly human, and they stand no chance ofbeing lumped in
with the traditional modern-fiction stereotypes.
The tone throughout is distinctly irreverent, cheeky, and
with a sense of its own ridiculousness. See quote:
"...sometimes the plummy, playful verbiage is
obnoxious. It conceals emotion. Actually, it mocks emotion, the better to
pretend to be above it." p. 177
Ironic or self-mocking? Given Harkaway's approach to emotion
and his way with words about it, I tend toward the latter. Actually, I think
that's part of what I find so appealing about his novels. He finds words for
catastrophic moments and deep emotion, and suddenly the insane world of
Angelmaker is a little more believable, because right here is something we can
relate to. See quote:
"[something has happened] most awfully, most deliberately,
most pointedly, and that is the world now, newborn and hard." p. 105
There's something about this that is quintessentially
Harkaway. His characters run up against reality, and they are unlike heroes in
that they don't have any special defenses for when the world knocks them silly,
and we know how they feel because we are also unlike heroes in that way.
The threads of this story are delightfully steampunk-ish,
with absolutely no mention of zombies (well, ok, just once, and it's part of a
solid plotline, and unique enough that it might just be a wink-and-a-nod in the
direction of that tired genre). They're also incredibly vivid (in line with
China Mieville, although not nearly to that
extent. Despite the imagery,I found myself wishing for a few ink drawings along
the way (for the Book and the whojimmy, in particular).
But! I can't possibly complain, because while there are no
drawings, there is a code hidden on the (American) dust jacket! I haven't worked
it out yet, but the fine folks at Knopf have
left a few clues. I suppose I can give up illustrations in favor of a
clockwork code on a book about a clockwork book.
Ok, *now* we compare with The Gone-Away World?
Full disclosure, as above: The Gone-Away World pretty much
tops my list of favorite books (although it is sometimes beaten out by
Name of the Wind), which definitely colors my opinion. That said, I do still think that Angelmaker is a good book
with solid storytelling and an enjoyable sense of fun. It's a much more
character-driven book than TGAW in that this is more of a book about what
people figuring out their relationships to each other while the world goes to pieces
(and trying to save it), rather a book about the world going to pieces and
people trying to save it (and figuring out their relationships to each other in
the process). Whether you happen to like the former approach over the latter or
vice versa is just personal preference.
Angelmaker is perhaps a more mature book than TGAW. We see
more character development, more self-doubt, less recklessness (though there is
still a significant amount of it!). It makes me slightly sad, because we have
grown up from the Gone Away World. The issues in this world are the same as in
the last one - Bad People who do Bad Stuff to destroy Everything - but as
"responsible grown-ups on the wrong side of thirty-five" (p.86), we
cannot give them the faces of monsters and call on the School of the Voiceless
Dragon to ferret them out and do away with them. This is the world now, newborn
and hard.
Enough mawkishness - this is still undoubtedly a book worth
your time. It's unlike any other book on the market – wildly imaginative, in
equal parts violent and humorous, and I think the author knows it:
"Who creates a superweapon or a superwhatever-it-is and
makes it so bloody whimsical?" (p. 203).
Thank you, Nick Harkaway, for making the world so bloody
whimsical.
Good quotes:
"Mr.Pritchard! What are you doing? is that O-soto-gari?
No! It is not! It is a yak mating with a tractor! That is *really* very very
not very good!" p. 127
"The man is a brigand in the pay of the Opium Khan;
it's not every day he is assailed a willowy white lunatic in forest green,
borne along on a wave of fire by a box on wheels. Indeed, there probably aren't
many people who have great familiarity with this situation." pp. 245-246.
Ha! Amazon's statistically improbable phrase capturer must
have a field day with Harkaway's books.
"From within comes a noise like a trombonist being
goosed during the overture." p. 261
TL;DR: Good book. Inventive and fun. Maybe not as good as his first, but cleverly written.
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