Excessive Candour
Clock Whisperer

If there ever was a book that had to run on time, Mainspring is that book. Every page of Jay Lake's new novel is either a little behind the beat, or spot on, or overwound: for it is the nature of the Story beast he has set in motion to work only if it keeps in step.

We begin around the year 1900 in an alternate world constructed along lines that combine a parody of Newtonian physics and steampunk. The world literally runs on clockwork, attached at the equator by a ring of great brass gears to an orbital track in the not-so-high heavens, around which it rolls, like an orrery constructed out of solid planet. (The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ineffably locates this novel under the heading "Solar system—fiction," just the kind of sort-by-size-of-marble Syntopicon flim-flam that no genuine scholar ever makes sense of but that governs the cataloguing practice of professional librarians everywhere, willy-nilly.) America is under the rule of Great Britain; the first industrial revolution has hardly occurred, though "electrick" devices are beginning to be found in larger cities; New England, where the action begins, remains, therefore, strait-laced and punitive, though the seams are beginning to crack.

The first pages of Mainspring have the almost hypersonic austerity of the first pages of a typical Gene Wolfe novel. A young clockmaker's apprentice named Hethor (a name right out of The Book of the New Sun, significantly that of the sailor who turns out not to be a human with mechanical parts but a robot with human parts) is awakened in the night by the angel Gabriel, who tells him that the Key Perilous that winds the world up has been lost, and that it will be his task (for the rest of the novel) to seek for the Key and to do what must be done with it:

"The Mainspring of the world winds down," the angel continued. "Only a man, created in the image of the Tetragrammaton, can set it right. Only you, Hethor."

That last sentence may be directed a bit more to the Young Adult market that Wolfe usually manages—I would imagine that the Library Reviewers of America, ignoring the copious doses of torture and violence Hethor experiences, will only fault Mainspring for the clients because he enjoys some explicitly life-enhancing sex before the final windup, but that otherwise they will deem it OK for values library systems—but "the image of the Tetragrammaton" is as loaded as any Wolfe reference to God stuff.

In any case, Silk-like, Hethor obeys the voice of the god within the ear: Though melodramatic travails hamper him for a hundred pages or so, he never really wavers from the task of fulfilling his destiny, according to his special nature (the origins of which are left unexplained, though we are told that he is somehow able actually to hear the clockwork within the world, and is able to hear it gradually running down). Aided by what seems to be a freemasonry of supporters (we are never told more), he gets to Boston but is cast into prison there after declaring his mission to the British Viceroy in the presence of the mysterious William of Ghent, who casts him into a dungeon, from which he is rescued/shanghaied, finding himself heading south on Her Imperial Majesty's Ship of the Air Bassett, a beautifully rendered dream of steampunk technology, saturated with detail, striated, odorous, technicolor, and manned by a crew straight out of C.S. Forester and Sons. The clockwork orrery world is Lake's biggest think in Mainstream, but Bassett is his most beguiling, though (strangely) the principles by which it operates have nothing to do with clockwork.

A story told by the ticktockman

But it is only after the first hundred pages that Bassett comes into her own, dragging the novel with her. Suddenly Lake seems to forget that he's delineating the growing-pain ho-hums of a juvenile prot and almost viscerally opens his keyboard to the world he has created. Eventually the Bassett reaches the great equatorial Wall that bears the orrery Gears, and we reach the imaginative heart of the tale. Vertical cities—almost all abandoned—adhere dizzyingly to cliff walls, tiny figurines turn out, on closer inspection, to be vast edifices carved out of rock into the shape of inhuman giants, whose heads turn impassibly to watch; for quite a few pages, we find ourselves inhabiting something like a Big Planet built sideways, or a Ringworld, or a World Ship. For quite a few pages, Lake gives us time to contemplate the possible nature of the world whose veins we can touch now: Is Mainspring in fact actually set in a World Ship (like Wolfe's Whorl but larger), or in a Pocket Universe (a thought experiment on the part of some Ancient Race, like one of Philip Jose Farmer's, in the construction of joke universes), or in a genuine alternate history (with a jonbar point to explain the divergence for our own universe), or what? Hethor climbs the Wall and is solaced by an Elder with Eastern Wisdom at his Beck, and gets to the other side, and falls miles to Earth but winged men save him, and so forth. This is genuinely elated narrative writing; the enriched palate of the telling of the entire middle third of the book makes it seem, for as long as it lasts, that some revelation may be at hand.

It may have been too much to ask. To have brought Mainspring off wholly successfully, Lake would have had to introduce some genuinely surprising revelation as to the structure of his clockwork enterprise, but his bag contains no trick. Hethor's discovery of the exquisite tribe of "correct people," jungle dwellers in Green Mansions whose Rima figure he falls in love with and has great sex with (her intercrural scent is flowers), moves beautifully but does not turn the plot, perhaps, entirely to the point. The last third of the novel all too readily repeats pleasures and miseries Hethor has already experienced, and the conundrums underlying his quest are solved—I'm afraid pretty predictably—in the deeply American realization that the true Tetragrammaton is within: that Hethor carries the Key Perilous in his heart, in fact it is his heart. After an excitingly described descent into what turns out to be a kind of not quite Symmesian Hollow Earth, the mainspring gets rewound, as we kind of knew was going to happen. And Earth is ticketyboo again.

Here and there, though, we'd been given hints of a far more taxing and memorable argument, and maybe we missed the point somewhere; or maybe Lake lost sight of the bouncing ball. It had been clear from the get-go—the Wolfean angel with its world-transformative message was only one of the cues—that young Hethor was not so much the protagonist of a tale as he was its Pilgrim. Though they are always given an edge over their companions, protagonists of adventure stories are normally intrinsicate with the reality of the world whose story rules they bend just enough to win; but Hethor's pilgrimage through Mainspring is inherently the Pilgrim's Progress of a Being of Greater Density through a world of snare and illusion, whose rules do not govern him in the end. Hethor knows—rightly—that he is destined to move through the contingencies of that world toward his destiny, regardless of the plot-twists and anguishes that seem to bar his course; he knows, in fact—again rightly—that the very implausibility of the near escapes and convenient coincidences and guru sessions that mark his course are themselves a mark of the truth of his special nature. For most of Mainspring this works very neatly: the more unlikely Hethor's story becomes, the more it is confirmed to be the true Stations of the Cross story of the book. But the last 50 pages of the tale are very nearly disastrous, because Lake (who may be too secular a writer to give final breath to Holy Writ) simply allows its two-fold structure to lapse. The True Story within the secular hoohah simply peters out. The world is saved, sure: but what world? and who the Saviour? and who the mapper of the Path he trod? Beats me, says Mr. Lake, and shuts the page.

In the end, Mainspring—for all its hallucinatory visual intensities and for all the fun of the Progress it traces—simply unwinds. In the end, for all the skill and joy he deploys, Lake simply doesn't stand his watch.