Fran: L is for Lake

The late Jay Lake's book, Mainspring, was a complicated read.  It's an alternative history with a steampunk setting and an adventure feel.  The main character, Hethor Jacques, is a clockmaker's apprentice and in the first pages is charged with finding the Key Perilous by the archangel Gabriel because the Clockwork of the World is running down.  His quest rapidly set in motion by the competing theologies of those who believe God to be an active clock maker, involved in Creation, and those who seek to tear down the orbital clockwork of the world and free man to his own ingenuity, Hethor travels from New Haven to Boston to the equatorial regions where the Wall divides industrial North and magical/pastoral-Edenic South.  The South is filled with unusual creatures and part of this book is Hethor's discovery of his own racism/bigotry/errors.  Hethor drives onward to the South Pole to the Mainspring to fulfill his quest.

I found it slow-going but definitely worth continuing.  I liked the idea of "Brass Christianity"--this steampunk rendition of God as an actual clockmaker winding the world.  I was--as an art historian who reads a lot of theology--disappointed by the lack of nuance in some of the characters and Lake's lack of interest in explaining more deeply the concept of the worldview.  One of the things that I wish were clearer is the reason for selecting Hethor--he hears the sound of the world the way a clockmaker hears the watch mechanism and when he's in the South, that becomes a magic shaping/constructing force.

But I think part of the sacrifice of the theology was for the adventure (a la Edgar Rice Burroughs).  The fancy of the Candlepit where Hethor is held captive, the airship on which he sails, the scary winged creatures who carry him off, the jungle cities of immense size and shaping, the "correct people" who live in the Southern Hemisphere--straight out of the Burroughs kinds of worlds (King Solomon's Mines, Tarzan, etc.). 

The book has problems--mired in the sexism and colonialism of the steampunk alternate history and the Christian frame, Lake chooses to some extent to live in those stereotypes (few women of real character, Aryella--the "correct person" with whom Hethor falls in love and helps him on his quest--is an Eve Type).  And Hethor (our connection as readers) learns from some of his prejudices--especially in learning to love the correct people--but is ultimately contained in this steampunk Edwardian aesthetic/worldview, rather than busting out of it to create something fully new.

Mike Perschon has a much longer review on his site.