I can cross a book off of my summer reading list! As you may have seen in my last post, I was unsure of what to read first, but I ended up settling on Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.
It’s the story of a circus whose performers have all been turned into vaguely steampunkish creations: there’s a guy whose lungs have been replaced with clockwork bellows, the aerialists’ bones have been replaced by hollow copper facsimiles, and the strongman has a metal spine with a clock sticking out of his back. The circus travels around a post-apocalyptic world where governments come and go and never control more than a tiny smidgeon of the map at any one time. Eventually, a scheming government official (known only as “the government man,” which made me think of the G-Man from Half Life) takes an interest in the circus because he believes that the technology inside of the performers could be used to create an army of super soldiers.
I really shouldn’t have liked this story. The plot zips forward and backward like a trapeze artist and there are multiple POV characters. Although most of the narration is third person omniscient, it sometimes veers into first person. But you know what? It worked. These are all things that I usually dislike, but they never irritated me in this story. The writing is so strong and artful that you just get sucked in.
Even though the main plot comes to a satisfactory resolution, the reader is still left with a number of unanswered questions. It’s never explained how Boss (the lady who runs the circus and does all the machining) got her strange power. Nor is it explained why the world was apparently engulfed in chaos. But it really doesn’t matter within the confines of the story. All you need to know is that Boss has this power and that the world has fallen apart. The details are irrelevant. And the more details you give, the more you invite your readers to peer behind the illusion you’ve created.
A final note: if I didn’t have a Kindle, I probably wouldn’t have read this book. I’m not all that into steampunk, and I would’ve been reluctant to shell out $14.95 for the paperback edition. But the Kindle edition was just $4.95, so I was willing to take the risk. And I’m sure glad I did.
Next in the reading queue: The Man With the Golden Torc.
Codex Lochianus 