Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

This is yet another book that I found in the featured section of a bookshop (only this time it was Foyles, not Waterstones as usual), and I really loved it. It's not really my usual thing, a sci-fi steampunk gangster thriller, but it was really exciting and hilarious. The plot is very generic (a law-abiding, quiet man has to save the world from a potential doomsday machine and finds himself and love along the way), but the way it's told is absolutely entrancing, it totally sucks you into the action (at least, it worked on me). The world that Harkaway creates might be just too rich, there's so much going on that it's hard to remember characters and places in the absolutely avalanche of the bizarre, hilarious and fantastical that this book unleashes on the reader. Some of it is very melodramatic, and I don't like the technique of short, shorter, and shorter still sentences for dramatic effect (like, 'The engine shrieks. The great pressure tank sobs and moans. But it holds. Of course, it holds. This is what it was made for. Just like me.') The real charm of this book, for me, is in the extraordinary detail and variety of the bizarre underground London world that Harkaway invents, and the slightly Douglas Adams-like humour. Like the 90-year-old sweet old lady/ex-super-spy Edie Banister, who remembers that 'the trouble with shooting people... is that it's so hard to do just one.' As I said, the plot is generic and predictable (as is the ending), but it's embellished with inventive additions, such as the machine that might trigger the apocalypse, might make people see the truth of everything, or might just make the world exactly 9% better. That uses mechanical bees. Something that I personally found difficult in reading this book is visualising all the things in it. I'm really bad at understanding what fancy objects in sci-fi novels are supposed to look like, I find I never have any conception of their size, shape or anything, and they just remain like question marks in my brain. This might be part of the reason I dislike sci-fi. So when Harkaway is talking about 'the calibration drum', I don't have any sort of picture in my mind of what it is or what it really does, but this might just be me. The characters didn't particularly convince me, and Joe's (the main character) sudden romance with former childhood friend and now sex kitten Polly isn't very believable, but it's all good fun. Nick Harkaway is apparently the son of John le Carré, and I have to say, I prefer his writing to his father's.