Nick Harkaway is a hyphen-novelist. A tragical-comical-historical-pastoral novelist, if you like; or more precisely in the case of this second book a fantasy-gangster-espionage-romance novelist. The Gone-Away World, Harkaway's well-received debut, was a slightly overfilled post-apocalyptic pick-and-mix of genres. Just as blithe in its disregard of verisimilitude and generic constraint, Angelmaker flits between old-fashioned villains in London's East End and covert action in 1940s south Asia, arranging its whistlestop plot around the modern-day discovery of a weapon of mass destruction in the unlikely form of a skepful of clockwork bees. It's an ambitious, crowded, restless caper, cleverly told and utterly immune to precis.
The novel's rather dishevelled hero is Joshua Joseph Spork, son and reluctant heir of the late Mathew Spork, formerly the dandified king of the London underworld. In search of a quieter life, Joe has left his father's gangster circles behind to take up his grandfather's trade, crafting and repairing clocks and automata in a dilapidated warehouse on the Thames. Now, though, Joe has run into the usual dissatisfactions of a single Londoner in his mid-30s, and through a mixture of genetic predisposition and sheer bad luck has unwittingly entangled himself in the quest for an apian superweapon.
Also chasing the secret of the clockwork doomsday machine are the "Ruskinites", a sort of monastic pre-Raphaelite secret service now in the pay of the evil "Opium Khan" an all-round pantomime villain known as Shem-Shem Tsien. And on it goes, beyond summarisation, making Don Quixote look sedentary. The octogenarian lady spy and the secret military prison, the serial killer and the guild of undertakers, the bumptious civil servants and the chairman of the Royal and Ancient.. A stingier novelist could find material here for a decade's output, but Harkaway is anything but stingy. The miracle is that it all hangs together so well.
Once or twice the wider sweep of the narrative snags on local oddities: among Harkaway's many enthusiasms is an attachment to the recherché, or just the slightly odd. So he will pause, rather breathlessly, to run through the bluffer's guide to Cartesian scepticism or the thermodynamics of free will. The word "actinic" which seems to have something important to do with electromagnetic radiation appears about twice too often, even for a novel as long as this one.
This is, no doubt, a hyperactive bit of storytelling, but despite all the hybridity and genre-bending, Angelmaker doesn't feel gimmicky. On the contrary, it feels agreeably old-fashioned. There is some well-managed Dickensian plotting, for one thing, including a tense scene in which the discovery of a body is presaged by a mess of misrecognised remains, and which owes a good deal to the discovery of the combusted Mr Krook in Bleak House. (On the other hand, there's also a throwaway reference to poor old "Miss Haversham", who seems destined to be abandoned by proof-readers as well as by her fiancé.)
What's more, for all the clockwork and locomotion, the thermodynamics and the Babbage technobabble, Harkaway can't be said to have hitched his bandwagon to the runaway engine of steampunk. In fact, with its lovingly hand-made "Ruskinite" technology, there's something in Angelmaker that sets it apart from steampunk's usual fetishisation of industrial Victoriana. From its frantic oscillation between plausibility and fantasy emerges an odd, unique composite that deserves its own moniker. Arts-and-crafts picaresque, perhaps.
And yet none of this quite does justice to the book. For over and above the clockwork bees, the automaton monks, the mad scientist, the Fu Manchu supervillain and the black-market army, Angelmaker turns out to be a very timely novel about belatedness. Joe, as he himself muses early on, "is the man who arrives too late. Too late for clockwork in its prime, too late to know his grandmother. Too late to be admitted to the secret places, too late to be a gentleman crook" And it must be said that this interest in belatedness raises questions which are, for the admiring reviewer at least, a bit awkward. It's no secret that Harkaway is the son of the novelist John Le Carré. (Indeed, when The Gone-Away World was published, he wrote a very sane and self-deprecating newspaper piece about the difficulties of entering the family business.) Equally, there's no doubt that he is a very different kind of novelist. His magpie approach to genre and the unkempt exuberance of the prose build up into something so distinctive that it seems rather tactless to raise the family connection at all.
But here is Angelmaker: a novel about complicated heredities; about the relationship between a famous father and a cerebral, conflicted son; about the mythic past of the heroic rogue and the tedious present of the white-collar crook; about trying to tell a new story in a way that hasn't been exhausted and worked over by previous generations.
That's not to say that Harkaway's novel should be read with one eye on the family tree. Far from it. But it might help to direct attention to what may be the most interesting thing about Angelmaker, namely how, in the midst of all this boisterous errancy, Harkaway finds a way both to acknowledge the particular circumstances of his own writing, and to reflect on a wider contemporary sense of generational unease. "Story of my life," Joe thinks towards the end of the book: "Don't make a fuss. You don't want to be noticed. Pay on time, work to order, play by the rules. Don't misbehave. Do as you're told, and you'll be all right.
"Except I did, and I'm not."
Skilled, dependable, law-abiding: despite his background in gangland royalty, Joe is in one sense a 21st-century everyman, indebted to a previous generation, disenfranchised by a conspiratorial state.
In the end, for all its old-new, serio-comic hyphenation, Angelmaker turns out to be a solid work of modern fantasy fiction, coupling credit-crunch anxiety with an understandable nostalgia for the mythical days of "good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime".
Download the audiobook at audible.co.uk.
