Burton & Swinburne in The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

So – what’s to be done about this whole ‘steampunk’ thing, then? It's got to be pretty crud, right - all that stuff about guys in goggles footling around in wind-up blimps and such, right? Surely it’s something I ought to have an opinion on, being as I love Victoriana - in particular, the kind of early Victorian science fiction that steampunk riffs on. I have long thought about expressing such an opinion. So here we go.
But first: some definitions.

The debate as to exactly what constitutes steampunk has inspired more angry words online than the finale of Lost, but I’m going to provide some fast-and-dirty clues to help any newbies out there to identify steampunk in the wild. The way I see it, it's like this. If you’ve got a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world in your novel that differs from the real historical period because of the introduction of unusual technologies or sciences, then you’ve got steampunk. If you’ve got Victorian-style characters who spend a lot of their time swanning about in airships, steam-powered vehicles or robots, or similar 19^th century tech pushed to its illogical conclusion, you’ve got steampunk. And most importantly, if your characters wear top hats and goggles with lots and lots of useless gears attached to them, you’ve got steampunk. If you’ve got alternate history where characters such as H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other real-life historical personages play a vital part, then you’ve probably got steampunk as well. There’s been lots of debate about what separates steampunk from ‘historical fantasy’, ‘gaslight fantasy’ and lots of other silly subgenres, but really, I can’t be bothered with such hair-splitting. In short, as far as I’m concerned, if it clanks like steampunk, it probably is steampunk. So, yeah, this type of thing has been allowed to run riot by publishers recently, and it's become something of a bandwagon. A bandwagon that I usually approach with extreme caution.

No. I mean yes, obviously, but just no.

And on the whole, it’s not something I’ve been massively impressed with so far. What I’ve found, by and large, is that your average steam-powered scifi novel tends to be a grab-bag of the same old tropes, arranged each time in a slightlydifferent order. It’s as if publishers believe that readers will be happy with just about anything as long as it features airships, goggles and giant robots duking it out in Dickensian London. And while these features often do make for a fun, pulpy read, steampunk books are usually not about anything. Beyond the admittedly fun trappings, there’s no heart. Writers focus on the surface but don’t see the potential of the genre for exploring the mores of Victorian society. Child labour, oppression of women, the wholesale rape of the non-European world by the colonial powers; there’s a whole lot to comment on. But nah, let’s just have engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a villain encased in a steam-powered survival suit like a Victorian Darth Vader, cackling as he ties women to train tracks. That’s what people want, right? So, overall, I feel that this new genre has done little to justify itself as being anything more than a source of cheap and nasty thrills. And because these trappings attract me so much, I keep coming back for more, hoping that the next book won’t disappoint.

From what I can tell, the Burton & Swinburne books don’t do a whole lot to buck this trend. But they are cleverer and more fun than 90% of steampunk I’ve read.

Clockwork Man is the second book in the series, and I’ve not read the first. But from what I can tell, the set-up is this: the allohistorical scenario in these books is set up when a time traveller from the future travels back to 1840 and accidentally causes Queen Victoria to be assassinated. From this point on, the timeline begins to drift more and more drastically from our own. This I quite liked, as it's unusual to have the steampunk elements of a novel explained as being a deviation from our own, ‘true’ timeline. The novels wisely focus on a character who was an already fascinating person in real life: the explorer Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. I’ve written about Burton before as he’s one of my heroes, and I was delighted to find interesting use of him made in fiction. Author Hodder was off to a good start with me! One of the great decisions in the books was to have Burton be aware that the timeline has been twisted. He’s conscious that somewhere in the multiverse there is another Burton who is travelling the ‘true’ path. Clockwork Man hints that the relationship with the two Burtons is going to have big implications for the stability of the multiverse later on in the series. In other words, there’s some great Back To The Future-style time-travel frolics going on.

I say - you there, eating the paste!

Burton is paired with his real-life friend, poet Algernon Swinburne. Swinburne is portrayed as a foppish hedonist. His constant drunkenness and whoring are supposed to be funny, but they grated on me and I found him quite a thin character. He only really exists to set Burton up with a kind of Holmes-Watson relationship; a trope that’s very common with steampunk authors, who often credit their interest in Victoriana to a love of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories.

The world the two inhabit is definitely one of the more memorable variations of a steampunk London (once you’ve read a few steampunk books, their settings tends to become rather generic). Though it’s not exactly clear how these changes spiralled from the death of Queen Vic (perhaps the first book in the series details this), for some reason London has rival factions of Engineers, who have access to fantastic steam-powered technology, and Eugenicists, who have run riot with biological science. What this means is that Hodder’s London crawls with clockwork robot men, flying rotochairs, mechanical omnibuses, as well as semi-intelligent dogs, messenger parakeets and giant insects. It’s almost too much.

The plot of Clockwork Man concerns the arrival into London of a man who claims to be the heir to a rich family called the Tichbornes. In real life, this case stirred the imaginations of London’s populace, the supposed Tichborne’s previous life as an Australian butcher convincing England’s working-class that he was one of their own about to get one over on the ‘toffs.’ The case went to court, heightening the differences between the classes. In Clockwork Man, the Tichborne claimant is a grotesque, obese imbecile who somehow influences the opinions of all those around him, eventually inciting class warfare and riots in London. There’s some mild, questionable themes about classism here, but really, the book is too silly to take them seriously. This plot becomes tied to the history of three strange, powerful stones found in various tropical regions, and the effect that they may have played in originally creating Burton’s timeline. There’s even hints of an ancient reptilian race that existed on Earth in prehistory, and how they might be using the Tichborne claimant to restore their power. Burton slowly comes to realise the connection between these happenings, and finds himself pitted against an unexpected enemy.

Way ahead of you, David Icke.

If it sounds like there’s altogether too much going on in this novel, well, there might just be. There really are a whole lot of strands to the plot, and while they eventually fit together very well, it sometimes feels as though not enough time is given to any of them. As mentioned above, Hodder’s London already heaves with so many scifi anomalies, it’s almost too much to take, and the setting ceases to lose touch with any historical reality and becomes a Victorian-themed fantasy world where anything goes. Add to this the fact that the plot calls for the psychic claimant, David Icke-esque lizard people, and hordes of pseudo-zombies (for some reason steampunk almost always involves zombies. Yawn.), and things seem somewhat, well, busy.

The book also suffers from a surplus of characters. Hodder continues dropping new characters into the narrative right till the end, and expects us to care about them. I’m pretty sure that we’re given four or five redshirt policemen to identify with over the course of the book, and their only purpose is to bite it during the climax. And the revealing of the main villain comes as a revelation to us the reader only because we know who they were in real life, which to me is something of a botch. To Burton and the characters in the novel, this ‘revelation’ comes completely out of left field, as it’s nobody they could ever have heard of, and there is no foreshadowing whatsoever prior to their appearance. This is a problem sometimes in novels which include real historical personages: just because it’s someone famous or interesting to us doesn’t mean it works dramatically in the context of the novel.

The writing is sometimes irritating and adolescent. There is an unfortunate surplus of adverbs (sorry to get nit-picky, but a well-chosen verb almost always stands better on its own without an adverb), and while this is intrusive, it’s nowhere near as bad as it is in the very similarly-themed Newbury and Hobbes books. Hodder also has a bad habit of being afraid to name his characters multiple times, instead constantly referring to Burton in a slightly clunky fashion as ‘the famous explorer’ or ‘the King’s agent.’ It’s stuff like this that pulls me out of the story.

I’d be remiss, too not to mention the fact that there are some cringeworthy ‘comedy’ moments in the book, primarily involving swearing birds and overly-polite English zombies. This stuff really fell flat for me.

And yet, despite these cribs, I enjoyed the plot immensely. It’s sprawling, but comes together in a very satisfying way. To me the Indiana Jones artefact-hunt stuff was evocative and thrilling, the use of historical personages ticked all my boxes (even if, as mentioned above, it was sometimes a bit of a dramatical fudge), and I couldn’t wait to read more. I devoured the book like I have nothing since Ready Player One. Most of all, it rekindled my interest in all things Victorian. I can’t wait to read the previous and later books in the series.

And as for the most important question of all: does The Curious Case Of The Clockwork Man break out of the steampunk ghetto and actually manage to be aboutsomething? Well, almost. Despite not delving too deeply into how the steampunk changes to the timeline have affected Victorian society, there are enough hints given to satisfy me that Hodder is building up to some satirical statements about colonialism, probably in the next book, Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon. Can you imagine? I await future developments with trepidation.

Be a good chap and toddle off, what?

Thoughts About The Bill Nye/Ken Ham Debate

So this week I had a couple beers and watched the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate. And I enjoyed it immensely. Afterwards, I went trawling the net, looking for commentary on it. One of my favourite articles was by a pastor who, while a devout Christian, was troubled by Ken Ham's attempt (and failure) to fight the creationist cause on scientific grounds. The pastor felt that spiritual matters should remain spiritual, and that trying to prove them with scientific evidence was folly. I couldn't agree more; within minutes I was drafting a comment that quickly developed Biblical (boom boom) proportions. I have pasted it below. While I tried to remain respectful to other people's worldviews, I recognise that I sometimes find it difficult to remain so while still being intellectually honest with myself. Nobody pats themselves on the back for tolerating the views of flat-Earthers, Scientologists, or Holocaust-deniers, after all.

The Poisoned Island (2013) by Lloyd Shepherd

Buoyed by my enjoyment of The Age of Wonder, I spent Christmas in the grip of a fixation with the Georgian period. As I’ve said before, it’s not a period I’ve been traditionally particularly interested in. It’s the Victorian age that still rules my heart, don’t worry about that. But while the Georgians might have lacked fashion sense and pseudo-modern technology, they sure knew how to conquer other countries; and as such, they built the model of Empire that the whole world was soon to tremble to during the Victorian age.
Their Empire-building may have been ramshackle and occasionally haphazard compared to what came after, but they set the scene for it. So to that extent, I’ve taken an interest in them. I spotted the just-released Poisoned Island at a WHSmith’s at Gatwick airport on the way home for Christmas and thought that it looked an appropriate read considering my new area of interest.

The Poisoned Island is a novel that takes the idea of Empire as one of its central themes. It’s essentially a detective novel set in London in 1812, as a ship called the Solanderpulls into the docks of the East End. The book is a sequel; the second featuring the proto-detective Charles Horton of the River Police as its hero. It being so early in the development of modern policing, Horton is rather ahead of his time in his insistence on such niceties as motives and evidence. When sailors from the Solander start dropping dead about East London, Horton sets to finding the killer using his box of new detecting tricks. Before you can say The Madness of King George, Horton is traipsing around Wapping, Rotherhide, and other places in the east of London that I pass through quite frequently on the DLR.

The book touches on quite a few themes that I found interesting. It was enlightening, for example, to meet Sir Joseph Banks again, so soon after his appearance as the hero of an early chapter in The Age of Wonder, and see him shown in a different and less flattering light. In that tome, Banks had been a young, open-minded adventurer with an interest in everything, and who made the most of his trip to the paradise of Tahiti. He absorbed the Tahitian culture and made the most of the willing women of the island. In The Poisoned Island, Banks has become the elder statesman of British science, large of girth and conservative in his philosophy. His south-sea adventuring as a young man is here treated with quite a good deal of cynicism; the possibility of rape, both literal and figurative, is toyed with continuously. And just as the destruction of the Tahitian way of life by the Europeans has resulted in something poisonous coming back to haunt London, Banks’ past amorous doings too come back to demand payment.

I enjoyed Banks as a character in this book; I liked his relationship with his head gardener and fellow scientist/explorer Brown too. Any time the book took a turn into their world of early 19^th-century botany, I perked up quite a bit. But then, this is a world I am currently exploring myself for the first time, and all the characters and discoveries they reference seem like new friends to me. Fish in a barrel, I guess. I am located squarely in the target audience for this stuff, no doubt about it.

As for the detecting stuff, well, it’s still not for me. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t care for crime fiction, not even Sherlock Holmes, despite Conan Doyle being one of my favourite authors. And whenever the book lapses into whodunit territory, I lose interest. In fairness, there aren’t many ‘crime-only’ sections. Almost none of the book is devoid of historical interest, what with this version of Georgian London being overrun by corrupt adventurers, famous scientists and half-breed aboriginals. There’s always something interesting happening. It’s just that the central plot – a mystery about someone killing other people – failed to grab me, as is usually the case with crime fiction, and as a result the book occasionally felt like a bit of a chore to me. I guess for me, this book is a bitter pill thoroughly coated in very enticing sweet stuff.

The Ghost Hunters (2013) by Neil Spring

Borley Rectory is, for me, the ur-haunted house. The original. The most 'pure' manifestation of the idea of the 'haunted house.' When I close my eyes and think of a haunted house, it's that Victorian red-brick monstrosity I see, its twin front windows staring malevolently. Before there was Hill House, before there was the Belasco House, there was Borley Rectory. I can't even hear those two words without being forcibly yanked back to my childhood: a childhood filled with 'real-life' books about ghosts and hauntings that I collected obsessively.

And those books were filled with Borley Rectory.


Colin Wilson and Peter Underwood had a lot to say in their books about Borley Rectory, but the one that first introduced me to that rambling Suffolk mansion was the Usborne supernatural guide Haunted Houses, Ghosts & Spectres. I've still got my copy, and the painted illustrations in it still give me the creeps. I remember reading it on a sunny summer's day, aged about ten, and within minutes being so terrified I couldn't bring myself to took out the window, lest the ghostly nun of Borley Rectory be there, looking in at me, as she looked in on the Bull family so frequently. Eventually, I read, the rector was forced to brick up the dining-room window.

Brr.

So I think it's fair to say that I was pretty excited to find that someone had finally dramatised the story of the Borley Rectory haunting. Neil Spring's book The Ghost Hunters tackles the haunting of the house, and it's investigation by Harry Price. Price was one of my heroes as a child; the books I read painted him as a heroic man of science who investigated the most unusual unexplained phenomena the pre-war world could muster. He was a psychic investigator; a ghost-hunter. I must have thought the man had the best job in the world. To this day, I still believe that ghost-hunting ought to be done by English men in tweed who are scrupulous scientists and sift through their evidence in wood-paneled libraries, and not by fat, uncritical middle-aged American southerners who listen to too much Coast To Coast Am.

Great cover.

The story of Price's investigation of Borley Rectory has always been one of my favourite stories of 'scientific' paranormal investigation. As a kid I was mad for the idea of the time between the wars being a world in which intelligent men of science could properly investigate - and maybe just prove - the existence of the supernatural. Price investigated spiritualists, mediums and ghost reports, talking mongooses and even magickal demon-summoning. But his most famous investigation, the one with which he would always be associated, was the haunting of Borley Rectory.

The nun - THE NUN!

Spring rightly focuses on Price in his book, mixing fact and fiction skilfully throughout. His narrator is the fictional Sarah Grey, Price's assistant during his investigations at Borley Rectory. Sarah is a young woman who begins working with Price in 1926. Gradually her life comes to revolve around Price and the Rectory. It's a clever way to make a study of the man, and though Spring doesn't stick scrupulously to the historic record, and isn't afraid to bend the facts to fit the story he's crafted, I feel that he paints a portrait which is correct in tone if not in detail. Harry Price was a showman as well as a scientist; as much P. T. Barnum as he was Sherlock Holmes, and was in reality frequently accused of faking the phenomena he was supposed to be studying. My early fears that this aspect of his character would be glossed over in the book in favour of a more clean-cut, heroic version of Harry Price, were thankfully unfounded.

Harry Price - who you gonna call?

When Sarah first meets Price, he's a confirmed skeptic who delights in exposing false mediums. But when they hear stories about 'The Most Haunted House In England', they wonder if Borley Rectory just might be the case that changes Price's beliefs. Price and Sarah meet the various inhabitants of Borley Rectory (who are frequently not what they seem) and become involved in the haunting - and Sarah comes to wonder if the horror at the Rectory has come to take over her own life.

There were a few little things that didn't quite work for me in this book. The story takes place over many years, with years sometimes passing in just a few lines. This has been done to follow the true story, but it does result in some occasionally odd plotting. Also, there are just a bit too many plot twists, with Price's character flipping and flopping quite a lot as to whether he's a skeptic or a believer, some of his revelations happening off the page and some of his behaviour being a little inconsistent. And there's some clunky dialogue in the opening chapters that didn't sound like anything any real human being would ever say, including a cameo by a historical character who basically turned up and name-dropped a bunch of things that he's famous for.

Borley Rectory

BUT, having got the bitching out of the way, I can say that The Ghost Hunters is a fantastic book. I can't remember the last time I devoured a book as quickly as this one. It took me three days to read, but that's just because real life kept getting in the way. If I'd been left to my own devices, I would have read it in one sitting. And it's not a small book either. It captured my interest and filled my mind. Granted, I was already fascinated by the subject matter, but Spring does the subject proud.

Spring's greatest skill is in his treatment of the supernatural. Just as he straddles the boundary between fact and fiction, he leaves us ever unsure as to whether human agencies are causing the 'haunting' or whether something fantastic is really happening. Like the actual reports of the haunting, the manifestations are mostly low-key but extremely disturbing. There are some real scares to be had in this book, and had without forgetting the complex reality of the Borley Rectory story. The line between truth and lie becomes so tangled that it'd hard to know what to believe or what to expect. many characters have reasons to make up stories about the house, but some of the phenomena remain inexplicable. The sense of mystery, rather than in-your-face horror, is masterful. The nun chilled me just as she did years ago, the seance scenes tapped into my sense of wonder, defeated the cold, logical part of my brain and left me wondering if it was just possible that communication with the dead wasn't all just smoke and mirrors. And it's this dichotomy between belief and skepticism, between the real and the fake, that fuels the plot of the book.

This IS the definitive version of the Borley Rectory story; not the true story, but the legend that Borley Rectory has become. There will never be a better fictional take on it. This book is the closest you'll ever come to spending a night in a haunted house with the first ghost-buster, Harry Price, back when people believed that science was going to prove the existence of life after death. And not just any haunted house, either:

The original.

Prometheus Is A Bad Movie

Look, I'm sorry, Prometheus is just a bad movie.

I didn't like it at the cinema. Even first time around, my gut reaction was disgust. I felt as though I was being psitol-whipped in the face with stupidity pretty much every five minutes.

But maybe I had been too hasty. After all, there are a lot of people who like it. So I decided to give it another chance. But, after subsequent viewings, I'm sorry to say that Prometheus is not a good movie that's been misunderstood, it's not a movie chooses to focus on theme over plot, and it's not a 'flawed masterpiece,' as many people have suggested in their reviews. It is a BAD movie.