Angelmaker

Starred review from January 23, 2012
In Harkaway’s endlessly inventive second novel (after The Gone-Away World), Londoner Joe Spork has turned his back on his late father’s mobster legacy and become instead a clock repairman. Asked by a friend to fix a complex old machine, Joe finds himself inexplicably pursued by shadowy government agents, a rogue sect of technophiliac monks, a suburban serial killer and an identity-shifting Asian drug lord called Opium Khan. As Joe races to discover the true purpose of the machine, he learns that the answer might lie with elderly Edie Banister, a superspy during WWII. Edie’s flashbacks to her war adventures are easily the most diverting aspect of this book, but in no way overshadow Joe’s frantic search to uncover the truth about the machine, a doomsday device that turns out to be linked to his family history. With the fate of the world in his hands, Joe realizes that the only way to save the planet might be for him to embrace his father’s gangster heritage. Perhaps inspired by the New Wave science fiction of Michael Moorcock, the London crime novels of Jake Arnott, and the spy fiction of John le Carré (the author’s father), the novel ends up being its own absurdist sendup of pulp story tropes and end-of-the-world scenarios. Although the narrative often threatens to go off the rails, Harkaway makes his novel great fun on every page. Agent: Patrick Walsh, Conville and Walsh Literary Agency, U.K.

Starred review from March 1, 2012
A bang comes at the door, and with it an offer that one shouldn't refuse but must. Thus begins Brit novelist Harkaway's (The Gone-Away World, 2008) latest stuffed-to-the-rafters romp through genres and eras. Harkaway is the son of spy-thriller master John le Carre, but he has none of his father's economy or world-weariness. Indeed, he takes a more-is-better approach: If one jape is good, 10 will kill; if one dramatic arc succeeds, let's have a few more. The tale opens up as a sort of hard-boiled fantasy: The unfortunately named Joe Spork, a clock repairer by day, finds himself drawn into a weird web involving his father, a gangster and half of British intelligence during World War II and the early years of the Cold War, all courtesy of a sort of doomsday machine that falls into his possession. The current inhabitants of Whitehall want it. So does a bad, bad Asian dictator. A band of steampunks called the Ruskinites--you've got to know a little something about Victorian aesthete John Ruskin for that joke to work--figure in the proceedings, as do assorted hunters and collectors. Joe has a few choices: He can hit the trail, he can turn tough-guy and fight back or he can sell out. Which choice he'll stick with is a matter on which Harkaway leaves us guessing, meanwhile traveling the edges between fantasy, sci-fi, the detective novel, pomo fiction and a good old-fashioned comedy of the sort that Jerome K. Jerome might have written had he had a ticking thingy instead of a boat as his prop. Harkaway is a touch undisciplined; his tale stands comparison to Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, but it's a lot looser, and sometimes there's too much of a good thing. But it's a funny surfeit, rich with good humor and neat twists--and you've got to love the self-doubting super-spy heroine, once a bit of a femme fatale, now a dotty oldster: "She has to admit privately that she may be mad...She has not lost her marbles or popped her garters, or any of the cosier sorts of madness she had observed in her contemporaries. She has, if anything, gone postal." A touch early in the season for a beach book, though just the kind of thing to laugh at away from polite society. Top-notch.

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October 1, 2011

In stark contrast to his London gangster father, Joe Spork makes a living repairing clocks. But the device he repairs for Edie Banister, not just a sweet old lady but a former superspy (think Helen Mirren in Red or The Debt?), turns out to be a 1950s-era doomsday machine. That prompts sharp reaction from both the British government and a South Asian dictator Edie sparred with ages ago, and soon hapless Joe is brought into the renewed hostilities. Harkaway repeats the sometimes funny sf-tinged thrillerish tone of his well-received debut, The Gone-Away World. Buy wherever that book did well.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2012
Harkaway's celebrated debut, The Gone-Away World (2008), offered a gonzo take on postapocalyptic fiction, but it was really just a warm-up acta prodigiously talented novelist stretching muscles that few other writers even possessfor this tour de force of Dickensian bravura and genre-bending splendor. At the center of the tale is a mild-mannered clockmaker in contemporary London, Joe Spork, who is doing his best to live down the legacy of his crime-boss father. Then an elderly lady, who happens to be a superspy from decades past, deposits a curious artifact on Joe's doorstop, and before you can say doomsday machine, Joe's friends are being murdered, he's accused of terrorism, and he appears to be the only person with even an outside chance of saving humanity from a truly bizarre form of extinction: the doomsday machine, we learn gradually, was designed to bring world peace by forcing us to speak only the truth, but in the wrong hands, truth-telling can be the deadliest of weapons. Yes, there's espionage here, along with fantasy and more than a little steampunk, but there's also an overlay of gangster adventure, a couple of tender romance plots, and some fascinating reflections on fathers and sons and the tricky matter of forging a self in the shadow of the past. The latter is particularly interesting, as Harkaway is the son of John le Carre, and while he writes in an utterly different style and on a much grander scale than his father, the fact remains thatstripped of its mad monks and artificial bees and pre-Raphaelite craftsmen turned thugsHarkaway's novel is at its core a powerful meditation on the anxiety of influence, similar in that way to his father's A Perfect Spy (1986). But influences aside, this is a marvelous book, both sublimely intricate and compulsively readable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)