Angelmaker

A reviewer on the Strange Horizons website has said that this book "has a puppyish quality and it is infectiously appealing..........bounds enthusiastically along ", and I have to agree.
It's entertaining, funny, and somewhat lacking in control - everything goes into it! I enjoyed it but it could have done with being much shorter and a bit more coherent. ( )

I had really high hopes for this book, and for the first hundred pages or so, I was sure they would be fulfilled and even exceeded. I absolutely loved Goneaway World, and Angelmaker has the same zany, edgy, creative humor. The writing in Angelmaker is much more mature than Goneaway World. The characters are great, the story is fun and funny, and I was having a great time.

Until.... [mild spoiler alert for the rest of this paragraph] the middle of the book got really bogged down. The plot stalled for a while, and so did the sub-plots. The big idea behind the book also fell a little flat. The device that is supposed to bring about the end of the world does so by removing subjectivity from the world - the bees of doom somehow make everyone always know and tell the truth. The book never really explains how that will end the world, or explores the implications of truth. So the thing that drives the entire plot never entirely made sense to me. Then, there were several torture scenes. I'm not so prudish as to be offended by torture per se, but if I'm going to have to sit through many many pages of really horrific torture, I want it to be for a good reason. I never felt like the torture drove the plot or enhanced the story in any way - it was horrible and nightmarish, and didn't seem worth it to me. Ostensibly, the point of the torture is that it turns mild-mannered Joe Spork into Crazy Joe, but the transformation felt very false. Joe spends the whole book struggling with the tension between following in the footsteps of his gangster father, or his law-abiding clockmaker grandfather. This tension felt false, and it didn't seem genuine that choosing the gangster path was the right one. Clearly, Harkaway wants us to root for the gangster side of Crazy Joe, but it's never really clear why.

The end of the book was lots of fun, and had a good, all-out, explosive climax. But I the character development didn't make much sense, and parts of the plot just didn't fit in very well. ( )

Here's the thing. I very rarely give a book five stars. As a Mainer, I was brought up to practice moderation. To say I liked a book is fine, but to say I LOVED it is a display of flamboyant emotion my fellow Mainers would look at askance. But there's no help for it; I did love this book.

Now the hard part. What's it about? Well, it's an old-fashioned tale of British Empire swashbuckling adventure (think The Man Who Would Be King, or King Solomon's Mines), a science fiction technology nightmare, a family drama, a coming-of-age story, a jeremiad against contemporary finance-world fiddles and the modern Orwellian state that tortures its citizens to protect their freedoms, a tragedy, a comedy, a romance. Hmm, that's not very helpful in giving you a picture of the book, is it? What if I say it's about a supervillain known as the Opium Khan who, with his "Ruskinites," an army of black-clad man-machines, and aided by the cynical complicity of the modern security state, works tirelessly over decades to achieve the power of a god over all of humanity, all the while countered by ingenious men and women and their steampunkish submarines, trains, various other devices and a network of extremely quirky characters and one ancient, blind, bad-tempered and one-toothed pug? No, I thought not.

Let's try another tack and look at the plot. Joshua Joseph Spork is a young, London clock maker and restorer of various types of clever machines, like Victorian automata. He is the son of the late ingenious and flashy gangster, Matthew "Tommy Gun" Spork, and the grandson of Matthew's disapproving clockmaker father, Daniel. Despite his love for his father and affection for the gangster world of the Night Market, where the criminal underworld meets periodically in a grand secret bazaar, Joe is so determined not to be like him that he has, as he says, dedicated his life to being mild. He's a quiet, law-abiding man, so shy and retiring he can't even bring himself to follow through on the world's most obvious hint when a generously bosomed barmaid places his hand over her heart.

Joe isn't a complete saint, though. He knows the sin of covetousness when he doggedly visits ancient Edie Bannister and feels sure she's working up to offering him some really excellent piece of machinery to work on. And she is, but she might have left it just a little late. What she has is a piece of a device that, like the atomic bomb, has the power to end all wars or destroy the world, depending on who controls it. And, suddenly, a lot of very bad men, including government men, want to be the ones to get their hands on it and are willing to do anything to Edie, Joe and everyone they ever knew to achieve their goal.

There follows a tale of dazzling imagination and invention that takes us back in time to Edie's youth as a highly skilled government agent doing battle with super villain Shem Shem Tsien and falling in love with Joe's genius inventor grandmother--the creator of the sought-after device. This long trip into the past is no digression, though, because everything that happens there is supremely important to Joe's story in the present.

In fact, though this is a long book crammed to the bursting point with anecdotes, people, places and things, not a single bit of it is frippery. It's all a part of the grand and intricate machinery that drives this epic story, one in which Joe ceases to be mild and embraces everything he ever learned from Matthew and his world. Why? So he can save the universe and get the girl, of course.

All of the characters in this book are deftly drawn, the plot is always easy to follow despite its complexity, and Harkaway writes with a scintillating and abundant style that is just to the good side of florid. I'd say the book would make a crackerjack movie, except you'd miss the playful ingenuity of Harkaway's prose.

Harkaway is the son of famed espionage writer John le Carré. I imagine he knows a thing or two about growing up with a larger-than-life father, and that has added poignancy to Joe's story. Harkaway has chosen to follow his father's career and I'm glad he did. Though I warn you that this book may ruin you for any other reading for awhile. When I finished it, I was still so under its spell that nothing else appealed to me. I think I'll just give up and find a copy of Harkaway's first novel, The Gone-Away World.

A note about the audiobook: Daniel Weyman is the best possible narrator of this book. He understands that this is a story that needs to be ACTED, with absolute abandon, and he throws himself into it with all the energy and dash it deserves. ( )

I enjoyed this quite a bit. A world apart from Gone-Away World, but fantastical and elaborate and comical and treacherous all the same. There were bits in the story where I felt a bit befuddled or disappointed, but I knew Harkaway would not disappoint (in the end), and he didn't. Might likely benefit from a re-reading (especially for the exciting parts I inevitably read too quickly, and missed potentially critical details). Four stars, with an option to upgrade later. ( )

It is nigh impossible to explain this book in a tidy wrapped-up package. Joe Spork, the main character, is an ordinary sort of fellow despite an unusual clock-workers trade and familial connections with ye olde London crime network. Edie, is a retired British spy of extreme age whose history and motivations it will require most of the book to encompass. She involves Joe in saving the world by foiling an antique, clock-worky plan to both, at different times in history, save and destroy the world. There will be witty banter beyond compare, and romance, and high-jinks, and goosebumps, and false teeth, and elephants, and witch/scientists of the most lovable/infuriating nature. You might describe it as a combination of any of the following words: clever, zany, mysterious, steam punk, pertaining to multiple religious orders, crime ridden, apiarian, smart, and intricate.

So, I fell in love with Edie the moment she started her flashback to girlhood. In fact, I demand that an inappropriately-sexy middle-grade mystery series featuring her be produced forthwith. When she exited the book, it broke my heart, and it was a little hard for me to follow through to the end with Crazy Joe, but I made it. This was just a ton of fun to read and very well written. ( )