Clock
by Nick Hemsley (Lulu paperback, 2006).
One can never be sure about self-published books. They certainly have a bad reputation, and most are likely (though I can’t verify this with actual data) just crap. However, every now and then you run across a book that should have been picked up by a publisher, but wasn’t for some reason. Clock is one of these.
The mechanist form of the book mirrors the structure of a clock. When with our protagonists, Nick and Elizabeth, the story is in first person and present tense, when with the myriad of other characters, it’s told in third person and past tense. The chapters alternate between Nick and Elizabeth, so that we spend an equal amount of time with each. They both have secondary characters formally associated with them, but not necessarily associated narratively. For example, Norman Bowl most often appears in Nick’s chapters while Ivy appears in Elizabeth’s. The characters are separated roughly along gender lines, though this is not strictly adhered to as the novel progresses.
The book is ruthless in its pacing. The narrative just pounds forward with nary a break, tightly constructed despite its sprawling list of characters. In fact, if I just saw the character list, I might think there were way too many for such a short book, but it worked surprisingly well. I adored the subplots with Ivy, Henry, Emily and Norman. They worked to balance the tragedy of the main story. However, I suggest just reading it through quickly. I feel that if you took a long break, when you came back, you would be completely confused about who was who and what their relationships were to each other. It’s one of those books that really needs to be comprehended as a whole. (And it’s short, so this is possible to do.)
“It was a revelation when he worked out that the pendulum, and the cogs, and the wheels, and that strange rocker mechanism (anchor or recoil clock escapement, he was later able to say), were not driven by the spring, they controlled it.” (9)
The only thing negative is that every now and then, you could see where having a good editor would have helped. Just a correction here and there in punctuation, a slight suggestion to tighten up the form. It would be the same with any self-published book, though, and I wouldn’t attribute it to laziness on the author’s part. If it does eventually get picked up, the editor could make those few simple tweaks.
Good lines:
“It was still a secret, in fact increasingly more so. The secrecy gave it the edge. There had been a number of unforeseen problems but anonymity seemed to be the key.” (16)
“The little starving girl on the news, holding her nose and poking at the body with a stick: she is dispassionate, detached. Her expression displays no emotion. She is just curious; it is interesting to see a body that has not got a person inside it.”
If anyone’s interested, you can order the book off amazon or amazon.uk.
