Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway - Review

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.

Quick and Dirty Photoshop Tutorial - Modifying Old Black-and-White Photos

Let me say before I even start that I mean to step on no one's toes. The author of this textbook, the lovely and accomplished Keiko Fukuda, has  done more for women's judo than anyone else in the history of the sport. She recently celebrated her 98th birthday last year and is still active in promoting and teaching judo. She's the highest ranked female judoka in the world - ever. They're making a movie about her. So when I say that I mean absolutely no disrespect with this photoshop tutorial, know that I mean more than that. This woman is amazing, and I would not EVER (literally or figuratively) step on her toes.

I've been working on ju-no-kata, literally the "forms of gentleness", for maybe 2 years now. It's not terribly polished, but someone was around with a camera and took this picture:

I think this is the third form in the first set, if inquiring minds want to know.

That's me there in the blue. My partner there sent me the file and said something about it being a good picture but an awful background. No problem! I said. I'll Photoshop us out and put us in the Kodokan. She replied that if I put us in the Kodokan, she'd blow it up to poster size. Well now. Challenge accepted.

I may have failed straightaway by not actually putting us in the Kodokan. (Turns out there aren't too many great matside pictures there that I could use as a new background.) Instead, I decided to 'shop us onto the front cover of Fukuda Sensei's textbook:

I promise to try not to be presumptuous.

So here's a quick and dirty tutorial on the quick and dirty photochop that I did this afternoon. A word of warning: these are not the best techniques you will ever see in photo retouching. They are quick, though, and luckily for me, these were both pretty forgiving photographs. Onwards.

1. If you're following along at home, I'll assume that you have one modern, in-color photograph that you would like to insert into an old-timey, black and white photograph. Import both of them into Photoshop on their own layers and make a copy of your color photo. I always make a backup copy of my image right off. I know I'm going to make mistakes, and it's easier to start over if I have my original image right there.



Sorry that isn't too readable. Just know that those two layers on the right are the same thing.





2. As you can see, in the modern-day photograph, we're facing the wrong way. The first step is to flip flop the photo horizontally. Select the top copy of the image by holding down Ctrl and left clicking on the thumbnail picture of the layer in the Layers tab. Press Ctrl+T to transform it. A box with handles should appear around the entire selection. Don't touch them yet, just right click somewhere inside that box and click on the option that says "Flip Horizontal". 



Flipped. 





3. One of the things I struggled with most while I was learning Photoshop (still, actually), was how to select and extract the bits you wanted, and how to discriminate between them and the parts you didn't. There are a couple options - the Magic Wand tool is fantastic, but it only works really well if you have an image that is fairly homogeneous in color over the piece that you want to keep, and a fairly homogeneous different color over the piece that you don't. No good here - our heads blend right into the background. The Quick Selection tool is good for the same type of thing - an image that contrasts sharply with the background. Nope. There are a few others - Quick Mask, Extract, that sort of thing, but I hope you'll trust me when I say I tried all of them and ended up, sadly, with the Pen tool. It's a last resort, but for this sort of detailed, low-contrast image, it's a good bet. What you'll have to do is zoom in and start drawing the outline of the figure you want to extract. Ideally, you'd fit curves to all of the figure's edges by clicking two points down, and using the handles to dial in the curve. I'll admit that I'm not a fan of the way Photoshop handles Bezier curves with the Pen tool - I like Illustrator for that better - so for some of it, I went the quick and dirty way. If you put enough points close together, they'll imitate a smooth curve just fine. It's calculus! Here's my completed path:



Once you've finished the path and connected the ends, save it! Go to the Paths tab and change the name to something memorable.

4. Once you've saved your path, go ahead and right click on it and click "Make Selection". A box will pop up that will allow you to select a feathering radius. I used a radius of 1 px, just to smooth out any sharp edges I left when I got too lazy to use Bezier curves.
5. You don't want to delete what's inside your path, you want to delete everything else. Press Ctrl+Shift+I (Select>Inverse) to select the "everything else" part, and press "Delete".
   



6.  If you're not working on this particular photo, this step won't apply to you. When you're competing in kata, you only wear a white gi. That means some color surgery here. Even though the final image is in black and white, I can't just desaturate it because the blue will turn a different shade of gray than the white. So, color surgery. Here, we get to use one of my favorite tools: Replace Color. Go to Image>Adjustments>Replace Color. You should get a popup box with a black and white image of your photo in the middle. Use the eyedropper to click on your original image and select the color you want to get rid of. Play with your color selection and the "Fuzziness" slider until the white part of the thumbnail represents the piece of your photo you want to change. Then select a "To" color by clicking on the colored square on the bottom. Here, I chose something close to white. If it's tinted, it won't matter so much because we're just going to desaturate it in a second anyway.



The white bit is what I want to change from blue.

7. If your color swap isn't perfect, don't worry. Just get it close, and the next step will erase a multitude of sins. With your figures selected (Ctrl+click on thumbnail), press Ctrl+Shift+U.
   

Not perfect, but better. 

See? Sorry for the weird cropping.

Good lord, I am GIVING UP on interspersing pictures into an HTML ordered list. Hell with it.

8. Ok, now we start the interesting stuff. Place your extracted figures layer on top of your black and white target layer - I used this book cover. Select your figures once more and press Ctrl+T (Transform). With both Alt and Ctrl held down, drag the handles of the transform box until your figures are the size you need. If you are covering something up, as I am here, you may need to use the Distort function to cover up as much of the original as you can. You can distort something quickly by using the keyboard shortcut: hold Ctrl and click/drag the transform box's handles.

Maximum overlap without looking grotesque.

9. This step is why I had to deem this whole tutorial "quick and dirty" - I have one screenshot for a process that took me 15 minutes or so. Here's the process: You'll be using the Clone tool to mimic the background over the areas where you can still see the original figures in the black and white photo. I did it in chunks: I cloned the stairs and the crowd over the top woman's feet and legs, then the mat over the second woman's feet, then the crowd over the second woman's legs. This will require some fiddling on your part, but I got lucky here - my photo was taken long enough ago and with low enough quality that I could look over some imperfections in the final product. This technique will not work if your photos are good quality!

If you look closely at the crowd, you can see heads and arms being repeated where the original figures were.  Luckily, this image will never see a printer or resolution that's higher than this, so I'm not worried.

10. This is decent, but the modern picture is much better quality than the old one. Let's age it a bit. The first step is to really overexpose the two foreground figures. If you look at the original textbook image, you'll see that their gis are almost totally white with no definition. Select the two original figures and apply a Contrast/Brightness adjustment layer. Up the brightness to something like +46 and the contrast to 10 or so. Your mileage may vary.

After I added the adjustment layer, I also used the Dodge tool to highlight certain areas. I don't have a screenshot of it, but if you want to overexpose your image even more, choose the Dodge tool with a soft brush set to about 40 px and 10% exposure. Start with the shadows and start overexposing a bit at a time. Use a light touch...less is likely going to be more here, especially when you start working on the highlights. Go through the shadows, midtones, and highlights slowly, trying to maintain some detail in the folds of the cloth, for example. Remember that once you've dodged something a little bit, you can mess with your Brightness settings to bring out the white even more.

11. That's better, but the foreground image still looks very crisp. In this step, we'll add some film grain to make that go away. Select your foreground figures and make a copy in a new layer. Title this layer "noise". Go up to Filter>Noise>Add Noise. In here, you can mess around with the settings until you like the amount of grain you see. I set mine to Gaussian, monochromatic (important!) and about 4% grain. Click OK.

12. That's not bad - maybe a little much, though. Turn your "noise" layer's opacity down to about 75%. You could also experiment with using the Blur filter, but I didn't find it necessary.

13. Last step. Even with the extra noise, the foreground looks a bit too crisp for my taste. To fix that, select the Blur tool and a brush with 0% hardness. Set the size to about 200 px. With very small strokes, gently blur your figure. 

Much better.

And there you have it! Here's my final version:

Here's the original for comparison:

Maybe I could have gone a little easier on the blur. 

That's all, folks. I know this was pretty slapdash, so feel free to ask for clarification in the comments.

"Be strong, be gentle, be beautiful." - Keiko Fukuda