Since it’s my friend Jay Lake‘s birthday, it’s about time I got around to blogging about how much I enjoyed his book Mainspring.
After Newton’s discoveries about the laws of the universe, many thinkers during the Enlightenment saw God as a "Divine Clockmaker" — a creator of the universe who then left it alone to run according to the laws he had set up, rather than intervening in the affairs of humankind. This was the philosophy of Deism.
In Mainspring, Jay Lake has taken the clockmaker analogy and made it literal: the Earth has a huge gear running along the equator, and moves along a giant track in its orbit around the sun. Thus, it is obvious that the world is a manufactured object, but the philosophical divide still remains between those who believe that the Divine Clockmaker merely created the world and left it to run on its own and those who believe that God still intervenes.
Clockmaker apprentice Hethor Jacques has no choice but to believe the latter, after the Archangel Gabriel appears to him in his attic room and tells him the mainspring of the world is winding down and he must find the Key Perilous in order to wind it again. This takes him on a journey from his New England home down to the tropics (on an airship!) and eventually to the world that exists on the southern side of the hundred-mile-high gear that encircles the globe.
Because of the clockpunk trappings (airships, clockwork), many people have considered Mainspring to be a sort of alternate history science fiction novel. But in my opinion, it’s really an epic fantasy. Hethor has what seems like a magical ability to hear the ticking of the clockwork of the world — and eventually other things, too — and divine intervention takes place at several points along his journey. (One of my criticisms of the novel is that such interventions take place perhaps a little too often and a little too conveniently.) Such things don’t fit in a science fiction story, but are perfectly at home in a fantasy.
Lake is a self-described "low church atheist," but that does not stop him from writing what is in many ways a Christian allegory. Hethor’s faith in God (and the occasional crises of faith) are portrayed in a believable manner.
I did find the plot a little too meandering at times, and Hethor a little too passive as a protagonist, but for the most part I enjoyed the world so much that I was willing to be swept along with Hethor into whatever happened next.
Mormon readers will note parallels between Hethor and Joseph Smith (young man in 19th Century New England is visited by an angel and given the task of saving the world, his story is met by disbelief from those who think the time of angels and miracles is past, he is given metal plates with words engraved in an unknown language), but they were not intentional.
In addition to the small criticisms I’ve made above, I’ll add a warning about some potentially offensive content. There is a rather graphic sex scene in the book. Fortunately, it turned out not to be essential to the story, since I skipped over it and was able to understand the rest of the book just fine.
Interestingly enough, I was able to write this review of the book without having read it. That’s because I downloaded it from Audible.com and listened to it on my iPod. The narrator, William Dufris, does a good job of giving characters distinct voices, and overall it was enjoyable to listen to the story unfold.