Book review: God of Clocks
IN THE hierarchy of bookish values, literature trumps crime, crime looks down on sci-fi, and sci-fi is sniffy about fantasy. Despite attempts to categorise all non-realist novels – sci-fi, fantasy, and the even more maligned horror – as "speculative" or "weird" fiction, the pecking order is enshrined in bookshops and review pages across the country. Literary writers can openly experiment with science-fiction – for example, in the work of David Mitchell, Andrew Crumey, Iain Banks or Jonathan Lethem – and horror has a respectable sideline running from MR James to Nicola Barker: but fantasy is still beyond the pale. Tolkien may top lists of the nation's favourite novel, and JK Rowling may sell more than any other novelist, but it is still difficult to be taken seriously if you write about magic, goblins and quests.
There is a reason for the underestimation. Most fantasy is pretty awful: sexist, politically nostalgic or naive, and larded with highfalutin archaisms from forsooth, my liege, to avaunt thee, foul demon. Moreover, fantasy is a genre in which almost anything is possible, and if everything is permissible, nothing is significant. If a spell can open locked doors, conjure food to the starving and even undo death, there is no engine of conflict to drive the novel. Fantasy writers not only have to create their world, but they have to create the rules that govern that world; and in too many cases these are arbitrary to the point of inanity.
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Hide AdThere are exceptions, such as China Miville, Scottish author Ricardo Pinto (whose Stone Dance of the Chameleons trilogy features an openly gay hero and resonating environmental themes) and, of course, Philip Pullman, the atheist's retort to The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. To these names, we can add Alan Campbell, a Falkirk-born former computer game designer who worked on Grand Theft Auto, whose trilogy of Scar Night and Iron Angel concludes with God Of Clocks. It's a blisteringly good read, baroquely imagined, and full of high-concept ideas. If it were ever to transform to the wide screen, you would need a director that combined Peter Jackson's scale with Terry Gilliam's surrealism.
You won't fully appreciate God Of Clocks unless you've read the previous novels. The heroes from the former books – Rachel Hael, a former Church assassin; Dill, an angel whose soul is now imprisoned in a robotic war-machine; and Mina, a magician with a very dubious familiar – were left stranded at the end of the last book. A war had broken out between Earth and Hell after Heaven's decision that nobody deserved redemption. The only hope lies in contacting the goddess who first expelled her sons from Heaven, if our heroes can get there in time. Time is of the essence, and time is the province of the last expelled god, Sabor, who gives the book its title.
Fantasy excels at alternative theologies, and Campbell's pantheon is vividly imagined. His gods are selfish, manipulative and vain; beings whose strength relies on their worship. Whereas classical mythologies tended to associate deities with natural phenomena, Campbell's gods are creatures of man-made inventions: as well as the eponymous god of clocks, there are divinities of knives, chains and boats. But this invention looks wan in comparison with Campbell's hell, a fluid maze where thought determines form, where your house is also your self and souls are condemned to becoming talking doors, shape-shifting swords and sentient rivers. With petulant earth-stranded gods, an empty and sterile heaven and a hell of absolute metamorphosis, you have to wonder exactly what kind of sermons the young Campbell was subjected to.
Campbell fully exploits the wonderful paradoxes and ingenious twists that time travel allows – people meet their future selves and realise ballads of the past were actually inspired by them. The taboos of Campbell's universe – about blood-letting, scarification and the consumption of souls – are discovered to have proper import. The epic battles and dream-like monsters are matched by moral seriousness and emotional impact. Given that three cousins plunged Europe into chaos in 1914, the idea of seven divine siblings wrecking the earth seems less unrealistic than it might.
In his descriptions of bizarre castles, a city suspended in chains over an abyss and especially the lunatic landscape of the underworld, Campbell seems influenced by, and stands comparison with, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Peake's visionary work, derived from his time in China's Forbidden City as much as his experience as war-artist at Belsen, now eclipses Tolkien's as a model for contemporary fantasy. Finishing God Of Clocks I was left in the delicious dilemma of wanting Campbell to write more about his invented world or just invent a wholly new one instead.