Clockwork Heart---Dru Pagliassotti

[darkelf105]

I finished up Dru Pagliassotti’s Clockwork Heart yesterday. I read it because meganbmoorehad reviewed it and I liked what she said.

Ondinium is a mish-mash of Rome and London. It has wire ferries, analytical engines the size of mountains, a caste system, reminiscent of, but not identical to the Roman social orders, and a very cool set of people who get to fly around on metal wings. Ondinium is on a mountain, opposed to Rome which is on seven hills, but I really get the sense that Pagliassotti’s knows quite a bit about Roman history. The fall of the kings and the transfer of power to the Senate in ancient Rome is echoed here in the rise of the exalted caste and their control of the city’s politics, and moreover, just like that event haunted later generations of Romans, so too does the rise of the exalteds to power haunt Ondinium’s social and class memory. It’s in the background and it’s very deft, very subtle world building. In fact, I am impressed with Pagliassotti’s world building and wish to know more. I hope there are other books, even if they don’t feature Taya and Cris (which they should!), because I really liked Ondinium and was very interested in the lands around it, particularly those of the Alzanans (who were the “bad guys”) and the Demicans, mainly because I really liked Lt. Amcathra. I also adored the main characters, Taya and Cristof.

Basically, I agree with meganbmoore. She pointed out that the novel seemed to answer some of the criticisms aimed at the steampunk genre, such as a lack of class consciousness and women as real individuals and not just window dressing, which are the ones that this novel largely fixed in my mind, though I also agree with meganbmoorethat Ondinium, the city the novel took place in, wasn’t white. I think, though, that the biggest thing that Pagliassotti fixed was the lack of actual characters that most of the steampunk novels I have read seemed to have. Most of the time, I feel like steampunk is an aesthetic and not actually about telling a convincing story peopled with believable characters. Sure, it’s shiny and super-cool. Trust me, if a novel has airships and a preponderance of gears, I’m in, but on the other hand, I’m also, usually, really disappointed because I prefer character driven stories over plot driven ones. Steampunk reminds me of hardcore SF and some of the military SF I have tried to read in that the novels seem to be about big ideas and cool technology but lack any sort of characterization that I can get behind as a reader. They are basically plots with actors, but no people. I understand that this is an aesthetic, too, and that some readers like their novels to be about “big stuff” like ideas or the effects of technology on humanity, but I sorta prefer to intuit that through a believable character’s perspective rather than shown it through plot development. I think that Pagliassotti did a fine job characterizing everybody in the novel and I just kept turning pages because I really, really cared about what happened to everyone.

So, all in all, while I wouldn’t call the novel mind-blowing or spectacular or genre-defining, I would call it solid, well-crafted and really, really enjoyable and more importantly, I would recommend it to lovers of steampunk and/or political fantasies because it has elements of both.