The sign of the albino toucan

I’ve just finished Mainspring, by Jay Lake, and I thought I’d write up a short review since I’m trying to keep this blog, uh, respectable in content.

Mainspring is a book about a universe made of clockwork. Our hero, Hethor Jacques, starts off as a humble clockmaker’s apprentice (a job field fraught with controversy, as some call it “playing God”), and is given a quest by the Archangel Gabriel to wind the Earth’s ailing mainspring using the Key Perilous. Hethor spends time imprisoned, gets shanghaied into Her Royal Majesty’s navy for a fateful trip to the Equator on the airship Bassett, and travels through darkest Africa on his journey.

I am absolutely fascinated by the setting. A whole clockwork world? (Link from Amazon.com’s Bookstore Blog) What a concept! At one point, Hethor actually crosses the Equator, which involves running for one’s life in order to get across the Equatorial Wall before the next gear-tooth comes along and crushes you like a tiny insect. The whole Northern Hemisphere has little knowledge of the Southern, since it’s so hard to get there, and views on it range from utopic to heathen to magical.

The time period is 1900-ish, and dirigibles are common. Christ was never crucified — instead he was horofixed (horofied?), and instead of making the sign of the cross, people make the sign of the horofix. The changes in Christianity and societal concepts to fit the horological model are comprehensive and follow a quite sensible internal logic. It is patently obvious someone has created the world, so (in Jay’s own words) “there are no atheists — only dissenters.”

I suppose this is the heart of one of the things that sits badly with me about the book. While reading it I had a constant nagging feeling that expressing an appreciation of the creativity inherent in such an obviously manufactured world is liable to bring on comments along the lines of, “A-ha! But it’s not really so creative, since the laws of physics of our world clearly suggest that it was designed to bring about life by God himself! We might as well be living on a clockwork planet!” Basically, I recognize that the clockwork solar system can be presented as a metaphor for the real world, but I disagree that it’s an accurate one.

Am I making any sense? I hope so. It’s a paranoid thought, and I try not to be a raving, rabid atheist/agnostic, but it really did decrease my enjoyment of the book. That and the fact that after a while I didn’t really feel drawn in by Hethor’s quest. The progress of his quest was so…random that I just couldn’t keep up the enthusiasm. I think the airship portion was the peak; after that things got less interesting. Especially when the romance subplot is introduced. I can understand the message of true love and sacrifice saving the world, but this particular true love didn’t resonate with me.

Still, the great setting is going to stick with me a long time, and it’s certainly a book that provokes thought. I get the feeling someone more familiar with the Jesus Christ mythos (and possibly some of the finer points of Arthurian legend as well) would get a lot more from it than me.