Mainspring by Jay Lake
The return to steampunk novels, I see.
Mainspring is simply the story of Hethor, a clockmaker’s apprentice and the proverbial “red headed stepchild” of the house. Things are going along as normal for young Hethor until the Archangel Gabriel visits him and gives him the quest to wind the mainspring of the world and find the Key Perilous. Hethor sets off on an adventure that is a long battle between Secular Humanists and those that believe in a Creator (God, brass Christ, etc.) Hethor runs into all kinds of problems along the quest and gets help from some and is fought by others.
The story is really that simple and there are so many great and not so great things to say about this novel.
The good: Character driven story. Hethor is the only character arc that is in this story. Other characters show up multiple times in Hethor’s character line and they are interesting in their own right. The story blends the ethical, religious quest line with the perverse and strange relations Hethor gets into. I wasn’t completely repulsed by the strange female love of Hethor because it really dug into the character of Hethor and offered a moral insight into his ethical backbone.
The bad: Character driven story. The fact that the Hethor story line is the only story line is a shame. The characters of William of Ghent, Malgus and the librarian are stories I would have love to have read and had more information about. These high placed characters come in and out of the quest but it seemed a rather LARGE stretch that Hethor would just happenstance be able to talk with them and the coincidences are too much to accept. The equivalent would be me setting out on a quest and meeting the governor and then the president just because I was on a quest. There is a magical aspect of this story but again it seems the discovery of this magic was more of an “ho hum” than an interesting part of the story. Mr. Lake took a huge leap with Hethor’s magic much like he did with the characters he meets.
The ugly: The Christian quest intermingled with hedonist bestiality were a little to much to handle. I understood the ethics that Hethor learned because of this, but found it just downright weird. Perhaps it was just the explanation of the acts that were hard enough to accept when they were implied…and then to keep beating it over my head was hard to take.
Overall, the novel was a very linear, character driven, story line that left you with a sore gut if you don’t like bestiality. The story left me wanting to know more about several characters and the ship that brought Hethor down to the great wall and I would love to read a short story series about these characters. The story was too linear and I really felt Mr. Lake failed in his attempt to twist the minds and force a re-examination of ethical judgments that he wants the reader to undergo. The story wasn’t strong enough to support this type of wide spread questioning.
I really wanted to like this novel because I really like his short story work.
FT rating: 6.8
