Book review: Angelmaker

By STUART KELLY
Published on Monday 6 February 2012 00:00

NICK Harkaway’s debut novel, The Gone-Away World, was a deliriously fun book, a roller-coaster of ninjas, pirates, mime artists and bad dreams that seemed to throw every conceivable conceit at the reader.

In fact, it was a work of such glorious, exhaustive excess a part of me wondered if Harkaway would actually write again. I am profoundly glad that he has: Angelmaker is every bit as entertaining and imaginative.

The hero of the book is a large, quiet man with the unlikely name of Joshua Joseph Spork. Joe’s father was the notorious bank robber Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork – the man who stole a dinosaur skeleton to order – and Joe’s life has been devoted to not becoming his father’s son. Instead, he has taken up the mantle of his grandfather, and has become a specialist in maintaining and repairing clockwork.

When he is asked to fix a very peculiar piece of clockwork – which seems to be a cross between a key, a book and a hive – it sets in motion a chain of events which will make him take up his father’s old ways. Joe is thrown in with an octogenarian female spy, Edie Banister, and her glass-eyed, foul-tempered pug dog, and parts of the novel are Edie’s memories of her time working as Britain’s top secret agent, in particular, her ongoing feud with her nemesis, Shem Shem Tsien, the Opium Khan. Various other factions have a keen interest in the mechanical bees: a pair of unofficial government officials called Titwhistle and Cummerbund; an order of veiled monks who worship the Victorian aesthetic thinker John Ruskin; the country’s most prolific serial killer Vaughn Parry, and a torturer called Mr Ordinary. The result is a novel which seems like an unlikely and wonderful collaboration between Ealing Studios and Mervyn Peake.

The quasi-Dickensian names are matched with an echt-Dickensian sense of London as a fantastic, eerie place full of ulterior routes and secret organisations. As a child, Joe was the toast of the Night Market, the peripatetic convention of thieves and burglars. He knows the Tosher’s Beat, the alternative thoroughfares of London that run through sewers and tunnels and seeming cul-de-sacs.

There is a deep vein of nostalgia in Angelmaker, a yearning for gentlemen crooks and honest rogues, for handmade objects and paper filing systems. Indeed, it is fitting that a novel so suffused with clockwork should be constantly turning the clock back. It seems influenced by “steampunk”, the sub-genre of speculative writing most familiar from the Lyra sections of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and the novel pays constant homage to Victorian inventiveness.

The throwaway references to terrorism and recession are anything but throwaway as they serve to foreground the novel’s profound hankering for the old-fashioned. Even the villain is a properly black and white villain, whom the reader can wholeheartedly detest.

Harkaway’s prose style is as effervescent and witty as beforehand. It takes a great deal of authorial chutzpah to get away with a sentence like “Edie Banister, wearing a false moustache which tastes of tiger flank and erotic dancer, sitting six storeys up on the window-sill of the aged mother of a renownedly murderous prince, takes a few seconds to contemplate the unusual direction of her life”, and yet Harkaway thrives on such looping, loopy constructions. There are similes that recall the comic work of Douglas Adams, and others which have a perfect rightness (a train collision is described as “silence made of thunder”).

As with The Gone-Away World, there is a theme running under all the shenanigans. In part, this is a similar kind of thought-experiment (there is a refrain, “if I have the mind of Napoleon but the body of Wellington, who am I?”) about identity. It also muses on the nature of rules, and the limitations of obedience – as one character puts it, “Great skill improves your chances. Great cheating guarantees victory”.

Harkaway manages the ideal blend of paying homage to a very British sense of decency and fair play, while at the same time idolising the rule-breakers.

• Angelmaker

Nick Harkaway

William Heinemann, £12.99

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