Angelmaker

 
 
Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf
2012
 

 

Angelmaker is, first and foremost, a rollicking good time. Harkaway tells us the story of Joe Spork, a clockmaker and son of an infamous gangster, who repairs what turns out to be a WWII-era clockwork doomsday device, decides to turn it off, and embraces his childhood lessons in crime to outwit the WWII-era supervillain who's trying to use the thing to end the world. We secondarily follow Edie Bannister, former lady super spy, long-time enemy of the supervillain, and lover of the device's inventor.

 
I don't know if Harkaway's writing qualifies as capital L Literature. I might describe it as ascended pulp, lying somewhere on the spectrum between Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon in his efforts to tell as fun and thought provoking story in the most interesting way he can. You'll notice the plot outline isn't that long or that complex. Instead, Harkaway fills his 500 pages by taking his time to develop his characters, filling out his world with detail, allowing information to be revealed at an almost leisurely pace, and telling each incident in a way that attempts to maximize its impact. It could probably be a bit shorter, but it's an awful lot of fun.

 
(Harkaway probably deserves to be better known and liked by SF/F fans. How many thousands of pages have fans of Malazan the Fallen, Wheel of Time, or even Game of Thrones slogged through, often while complaining about how much they don't like these long series they're reading?) 

 
I could also describe this one as Cryptonomicon meets The Rise and Fall of DODO. During WWII, orphan turned girl-spy Edie gets connected with a religious order of monks who build extremely well-made steampunk devices to better know God, and revere the words of John Ruskin. Edie works in a mobile code-breaking lab inside a train, then gets recruited to ride a steampunk submarine to South or Southeast Asia, to rescue a lady scientist who's building a machine for a supervillain who seems a bit like an attempt at a non-racist Fu Manchu. 

 
Shem Shem Tsien had a mother of minor British nobility and a father in the royal family of a tiny principality bordering the British Empire. Using what he learned at Oxford, Eton, etc, he killed the rest of his dad's royal family and took over the country, Doctor Doom style. The lady scientist, Frankie, thinks she's building a device to prevent wars, but Tsien wants to use it, initially for something like world domination and later for divine apotheosis. Edie disguises herself as a man, has the obligatory dinner meeting with Tsien, then rescues Frankie and blows up her lab. Later, Edie and Frankie become lovers.

 
Frankie's machine is supposed to save the world by letting people Know the Truth. Not just to perceive the world through our imperfect senses, but within its field, to correctly and philosophically Know what's true and what's not. The first time she tests the device, she accidentally kills a nearby village, because it turns out the human mind can't handle unlimited truth. In theory, if left on, it would collapse all quantum waveforms and usher in a perfectly deterministic world and/or universe, with consciousness either vanishing or only allowing minds to observe the unstoppable, uncontrollable behavior of their automaton-like bodies. Doomsday, indeed. Frankie later fine-tunes the device to operate at a much lower level, and much much later, geriatric Edie gets Joe Spork to fix it so she can turn it on, to make the world better by giving us more Truth without overwhelming everyone or destroying consciousness and free will. 

 

Edie's parts of the book were honestly my favorite.

Joe fixes the machine and reminisces about his childhood growing up as a Prince of Crime under his gangster father. After fixing it, he realizes that both a shadowy X-Files-like government agency is after him and that he's being chased by Nosferatu-like monks who somehow belong the same Ruskinite Order as Edie's friends from before. He gets help from hypercompetent legal fixers who used to keep his dad out of prison (well, the children of the original fixers), and becomes the boyfriend of a particularly lusty lady investigator. At some point he's captured by the government and tortured by the vampire monks, but his lawyer friend and fixer girlfriend get him out again, and this experience prompts his decision that obeying the law won't protect him, and the only way to stop the device is to lean in to becoming a gangster in his own right.

 
Harkaway tells the first ⅔ of the book through a mix of a little present-day action and long flashbacks, so that we learn the history of the device at the same pace Joe does. Joe's arrest serves as a kind of fulcrum, and everything after that is a madcap attempt to defeat the somehow-still-alive Shem Shem Tsien before he can turn himself into a god and everyone else into philosophical zombies. Harkway has sympathy for the idea that knowing the Truth is often a good thing, and several characters have non-machine-assisted revelations that help them make better decisions afterward. He shows a glimpse of what perfect-knowledge induced paralysis would look like, and gives us at least one chance to feel that moment of knowing the truth without him having to directly tell us, so that we can feel what the characters are feeling at that time. (Incidentally and unrelatedly, that "inception" moment is what the best teaching feels like too.)

 
I will probably switch it up by reading some shorter stuff after this, but this was easily one of the best and most enjoyable things I've read in awhile.