This book was a bit of a departure for me, and I’ll admit that it took a while to get oriented within the novel. I’ve never read a whole Steampunk novel before, although I think ‘The Clockwork Detective’ would please fans of most fantasy and adventure genres. If you give it time, you’ll find that McCandless has created a dynamic and well conceived fantasy world. You get a sense of a rich history and an epic political structure in which Aubrey Hartmann, the titular Constable of Aqualinne, is a capable but vulnerable player.
There is a scene about halfway through ‘The Clockwork Detective’ in which Aubrey and an associate face off against an angry centaur. This moment is vivid, well-realized, and fraught with tension, and it’s where this book clicked into place in my mind. The scene is reminiscent of the centaur scene in the first Harry Potter film, with a similar creation of awe and power at the mythical creature’s arrival. But ‘The Clockwork Detective’ is overall, more similar in tone to the later Harry Potter books than the first one.
Aubrey Hartmann makes an appealing protagonist. She’s equipped with a clockwork leg due to a mishap on a battlefield with a cannon ball. The leg is heavy and causes her great discomfort which she alleviates through the occasional swig of a mystical potion she carries around in a flask. The potion isn’t good for her, but the long term consequences are preferable to enduring the anguish of the present.
I enjoyed how the emissaries of the Fae were developed. McCandless taps into a common psychological place equally capable of realizing flights of fancy or nightmares. The Fae embody the slivers of truth inherent in folklore, the part of a fantastic tale that stops you from instantly dismissing it, and instead acknowledging that there are mysteries in the world we’ll never fully understand.
‘Mortal Engines’ is my only other real exposure to Steampunk, and I enjoyed ‘The Clockwork Detective’ more. There is a bit of Sherlock Holmes in this book, a bit of Harry Potter, and even a touch of the wild west. Mix them all together, shake them up, and the result is a highly entertaining work that hopefully will be the start of an engaging new series.
