I really really wanted to enjoy this book and I did…at times. Harkaway is clearly a talented writer and his
humour was second to none. And yet I didn’t enjoy reading the novel.
The writing is too self-indulgent for me to enjoy and the reading process feels laborious in its 566 pages. The prose while at times was witty and interesting, often felt irrelevant and completely nonsensical.
“As the ship moves, it sighs and chuckles to itself, so that Edie fancies herself surrounded by a giant, generous, asthmatic dog.”
How is a dog generous? How can a ship chuckle? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy heavy prose but it has to serve a purpose. Descriptions like this appeared far too often and jolted me out of the plot, ruining the immersive experience.
Aside from that, I felt hardly any of the characters had any real depth and they were reduced to strange caricatures. And I’m sure the love interest of Joe Spork created an exasperated sigh with many readers. Being far from complex, she is obsessed with sex and only seems to serve as a second-rate sidekick for the protagonist Joe. And, somehow the protagonist jumped from shy clockmaker to badass gangster in roughly 50 pages. Character development was severely lacking. It was too unrealistic and convoluted. And unfortunately, for me, it lost the magic of fantasy.
The plot. Ok. The novel had such strange pacing. I almost couldn’t believe that the final ‘battle scene’ was only given the last 30 pages out of 565. The novel either rushed the more interesting scenes or dragged the dull ones. And I felt neither a strong interest in plot or character.Despite this criticism, I do believe Harkaway is a very talented writer and I only finished the novel in respect of that. Perhaps the plot was too ambitious? Maybe the characters were
too cliche? Either way, I really hope he moves in a different literary direction for the future.Let me know how you felt about the novel or my brief insight.
Speed of Read: Slow
Length of Novel: Long
Genre: Crime/ Comedy/ Thriller
Author Origin: England