Nick Harkaway. (2012). Angelmaker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Nick Harkaway. 2012. Angelmaker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Nick Harkaway. Angelmaker. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Harkaway, Nick
   • bioText: NICK HARKAWAY is the author of five novels, Titanium Noir, The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, and Gnomon, as well as a nonfiction work about digital culture, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He is also a regular blogger for The Bookseller's FutureBook website. He lives in London with his wife, a human rights lawyer, and their two children.
   • name: Nick Harkaway

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Angelmaker

fullDescription

A rollicking romp of a spy thriller from the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World. • "A head-spinning cliffhanger that reads a bit like Harry Potter for grownups…. It would be a shame if no movie were made from this glorious piece of kaleidoscope-fiction." —The Wall Street Journal

Joe Spork fixes clocks. He has turned his back on his father’s legacy as one of London’s flashiest and most powerful gangsters and aims to live a quiet life. Edie Banister retired long ago from her career as a British secret agent. She spends her days with a cantankerous old pug for company. That is, until Joe repairs a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism, inadvertently triggering a 1950s doomsday machine. His once-quiet life is suddenly overrun by mad monks who worship John Ruskin, psychopathic serial killers, mad geniuses and dastardly villains. On the upside, he catches the eye of bright and brassy Polly, a woman with enough smarts to get anyone out of a sticky situation. In order to save the world and defeat the nefarious forces threatening it, Joe must help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago, and he must summon the courage to pick up his father’s old gun and join the fight.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Niall Alexander, Tor.com
   • content:

     "It's hard to put a finger on exactly why Angelmaker is one of the year's best books. Know this, though: it is."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Billy Heller, New York Post
   • content: "Greetings to Joe Spork, the book world's newest hero. He springs from the fertile, absurdist imagination of Harkaway in his follow-up to The Gone-Away World."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Adam Woog, The Seattle Times
   • content: "Brilliant, wholly original, and a major-league hoot."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions
   • content: "[Harkaway] manages to write surrealist adventure novels that feel both urgent and relevant. His novels are fun to read without seeming particularly frivolous, and beneath all the derring-do and shenanigans, there's a low thrum of anxiety: everything and everyone you love could disappear at any moment. . . . Angelmaker is a truly impressive achievement."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Glen Weldon, Slate
   • content: "A big, gleefully absurd, huggable bear of a novel. . . . A pleasantly roomy book, a grand old manor house of a novel that sprawls and stretches. . . . In passage after passage, Angelmaker opens up, making room for the reader, until we aren't merely empathizing with Joe Spork's plight but feeling it keenly. . . . All the more reason to applaud Harkaway for creating Joe Spork: not only like us but likable, a hero who serves not as a dark mirror but as a funhouse one."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Paul Di Filippo, Barnes and Noble Review
   • content: "[A] gloriously uninhibited romp of a novel. . . . Harkaway has managed to recapture the lighthearted brio of an earlier age of precision entertainment, when the world was deemed to be perpetually teetering on the brink of Armageddon but always capable of being snatched back to safety with a quip, a wink, [and] a judo chop."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Jonathan Liu, Wired.com's GeekDad blog
   • content: "A lot of books are fun to read for the plot; a smaller percentage display this artful mastery of the language. And precious few manage to do both. Angelmaker, the second novel by British writer Nick Harkaway, falls into that last category. . . . This is not the sort of book I zip through, despite wanting to know what happens next. It's the sort of book you want to let steep in your brain a bit before you take another taste."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph, (5 out of 5 stars)
   • content: "An intricate and brilliant piece of escapism, tipping its hat to the twisting plots of John Buchan and H Rider Haggard, the goggles-and-gauntlets Victoriana of the steampunk movement and the labyrinthine secret Londons of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, while maintaining an originality, humour and verve all its author's own. . . . Angelmaker must have been huge fun to write, and it is huge fun to read. . . . A fantasy espionage novel stuffed with energetic, elegant writing that bowls the reader along while reflecting profitably on the trends of the times. Gleefully nostalgic and firmly modern, hand-on-heart and tongue-in-cheek, this is as far as it could be from the wearied tropes that dominate so much of fantasy and SF. I can't wait to see what Harkaway does next."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)
   • content: "Harkaway's celebrated debut, The Gone-Away World . . . was really just a warm up act--a prodigiously talented novelist stretching muscles that few other writers even possess--for this tour de force Dickensian bravura and genre-bending splendor. . . . This is a marvelous book, both sublimely intricate and compulsively readable."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus (starred review)
    • content: "Harkaway keeps us guessing, 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. . . . His tale stands comparison to Haruki Murakami's 1Q84."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Jim Coan, Library Journal
    • content: "A long, wild journey through a London dream world. . . . With its bizarre scenarios and feverish wordiness, its huge cast of British eccentrics and the ark forces of paranoia and totalitarianism lurking everywhere, this novel recalls the works of Martin Amis and Will Self. Immense fun and quite exciting."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus
    • content: "A puzzle box of a novel as fascinating as the clockwork bees it contains, filled with intrigue, espionage and creative use of trains. As if that were not enough to win my literary affection, Harkaway went and gave me a raging crush on a fictional lawyer."
13. • premium: False
    • source: William Gibson, author of
    • content: "You are in for a treat, sort o
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      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.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      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.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      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.)

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      March 15, 2012
      

      This second novel from British writer Harkaway (after The Gone-Away World) is a long, wild journey through a London dream world as the planet balances on the brink of some big event. At his Thames-side workshop, clock repairman Joe Spork starts receiving strange visitors and threatening inquiries, all related to a machine he's been trying to fix as a favor for a friend. He soon realizes that a dangerous religious cult, in cahoots with the British government, is after this apparatus, which he has inadvertently set in motion with perhaps world-ending implications. As Joe is pursued around England and the body count rises, the novel delves into the story of Edie Banister, a secret operative for British intelligence before World War II who had been sent to Asia to confront a murderous dictator and kidnap a scientist working on an invention similar to Joe's. VERDICT With its bizarre scenarios and feverish wordiness, its huge cast of British eccentrics and the dark forces of paranoia and totalitarianism lurking everywhere, this novel recalls the works of Martin Amis and Will Self. Immense fun and quite exciting. [See Prepub Alert, 9/11/11.]--Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta Lib.

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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A rollicking romp of a spy thriller from the acclaimed author of The Gone-Away World. • "A head-spinning cliffhanger that reads a bit like Harry Potter for grownups…. It would be a shame if no movie were made from this glorious piece of kaleidoscope-fiction." —The Wall Street Journal

Joe Spork fixes clocks. He has turned his back on his father’s legacy as one of London’s flashiest and most powerful gangsters and aims to live a quiet life. Edie Banister retired long ago from her career as a British secret agent. She spends her days with a cantankerous old pug for company. That is, until Joe repairs a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism, inadvertently triggering a 1950s doomsday machine. His once-quiet life is suddenly overrun by mad monks who worship John Ruskin, psychopathic serial killers, mad geniuses and dastardly villains. On the upside, he catches the eye of bright and brassy Polly, a woman with enough smarts to...

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