Angelmaker. A novel crying out
to be filmed.
Nick Harkaway’s debut novel, The Gone Away World, blew me away. Once I had opened it I read
nothing else until I reached the end. The Gone Away World was
witty, erudite, moving, fantastical and demanding. Sadly, I cannot imagine how it could be
filmed. CGI has an amazing
capacity to put visual wonders on the screen, but the crucial action in this novel has to take place in our heads, as we come to terms
with the philosophical conundrum at its heart. If you have read it you know why; if you haven’t, give it a
try.
When I finished Harkaway’s first novel I started waiting impatiently for his second. Now it has arrived. It is called Angelmaker and it is just as witty, erudite, moving, fantastical and demanding
as its predecessor, but this time the narrative is imminently filmable.
Joe, a peaceable giant of a clockmaker, is
reluctantly recruited by a sprightly nonagenarian ex-spy into a battle to save the world – or maybe the
universe. As the forces of Law are
out of order he has to use not only the technical skills inherited from his
grandfather to find and defuse a machine, designed to save humankind but in
danger of destroying it, but also
the goodwill of the London underworld his father once ruled to fight the forces
of darkness. On the way he
discovers that his dark side isn’t so dark, and that he has earned the love of
a good, albeit unconventional, woman.
Nick Harkaway is one of David Cornwell’s
sons. Cornwell, of course,
writes as John le Carre.
Nick’s genes or nurture have given him the ability to write well,
research deeply, and create fully realized characters. But Angelmaker shows another aspect of the Cornwell line. There is righteous indignation
here. In le
Carre’s spy novels there ran a
deep current of outrage, a
disillusionment at the way good men and women were used in that war and then
betrayed by the State, or misled into
believing that the cause they spied and fought for was just and
moral. That
disillusionment was perhaps written out most starkly in The Secret
Pilgrim. When the Cold War ground to a halt le Carre lacked a subject that
engaged this moral passion. He
wrote some competent thrillers, The Night Manager, Single & Single, et cetera, but it was not until The Constant Gardener that he blazed again. Angelmaker is not a campaigning book in the way of The Constant Gardner and
The Mission Song, but there are still glimmers here
of le Carre’s sharp indignant
edge.
Harkaway has included agents of the State
in the cast of Angelmaker, and his hero comes to
see that despite their protestations ‘the end does not justify the
means. The end never comes, the
means just carry on.’ As we now know, the means justified or ignored by the highest
powers include lies, rendition, torture and murder.
So there is a beating moral heart to
Angelmaker, but there is also a lot of fun in this
picaresque, almost Dickensian, 21st
century Steam-Punk fantasy, crammed full of juicy dialogue delivered by male
and female characters who leap off the page and would surely leap off the
screen if embodied by some of our fine British character actors. It is a Casting Director’s
dream. So I hope
that some literate film-maker is looking hard at Angelmaker. Do
read it, see if you agree, and if you do, why not start a whispering
campaign?
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway is published by
William Heinemann. London.
Bob Vernon.
