Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (2012)
Well written but a slog
Book cover blurb
All Joe Spork wants is a quiet life. He repairs clockwork and lives above his shop in a wet, unknown bit of London. The bills don't always get paid and he's single and has no prospects of improving his lot, but at least he's not trying to compete with the reputation of Mathew "Tommy Gun" Spork, his infamous criminal dad.
Edie Banister lives quietly and wishes she didn't. She's nearly ninety and remembers when she wasn't. She's a former superspy and now she's... well... old. Worse yet, the things she fought to save don't seem to exist anymore, and she's beginning to wonder if they ever did.
When Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. The client? Unknown. And the device? It's a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie's old arch-nemesis. With Joe's once-quiet world now populated with mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realises that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she gave up years ago, and pick up his father's old gun...
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My Review
How can a book possibly be so enjoyable and yet such hard work?
I was determined not to DNF this book, I've already had a number I couldn't finish reading recently, and even though I pushed myself as hard as I could I just couldn't take it any more and had to put this one down. I'm leaving a bookmark inside in the hope that I might be able to go back to it at some point.
It's completely baffling to me, and hard to explain, why this book just didn't work for me. I jokingly commented to my wife that "Nick Harkaway just doesn't know when to shut up." But I think that is actually pretty accurate, there are just too many words, too much description and wordplay, and the story suffers for it. It's odd to have to say that because I really like the writing in this book. I love descriptive prose in most books, when done well, but I think the issue is that the author stops forward momentum to give us beautiful writing and elaborate characters. This is made very obvious when he does allow the story to take centre stage because the book becomes gripping and a proper page-turner. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen anywhere near enough.
Another thing that jarred with me was the fact that all the side characters were far fuller and more interesting than Joe, the main character. He seemed quite emotionless and uninterested, even bored, making him feel almost unnecessary.
I also have The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, which I still plan to read, and hopefully, he'll concentrate more on driving the story in that book because, if he does I know his writing will just sing.
My copy of this novel
William Heinemann hardback edition.
Published in 2012
566 pages
ISBN 9780434020942