{"id":4536,"date":"2022-10-10T14:24:40","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T14:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?page_id=4536"},"modified":"2022-10-10T15:50:45","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T15:50:45","slug":"the-emperor-of-all-things-by-paul-witcover","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/writing\/book-reviews\/the-emperor-of-all-things-by-paul-witcover\/","title":{"rendered":"The Emperor of All Things, by Paul Witcover"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Emperor of All Things<\/em>, by Paul Witcover<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is kind of proto-steampunk, in that being set in the mid-eighteenth century there isn\u2019t any steam in general use. Clockwork-punk might be closer to the mark. Beings native to the fourth dimension \u2013 known to us through myth and legend as fey, elves, whatever \u2013 are on the warpath and because the fourth dimension is so key to the whole thing, that unexpectedly puts London\u2019s Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in the front line.<\/p>\n

A cover blurb says that \u201ccomparisons to Neil Stephenson and Susanna Clarke are only very slightly premature.\u201d Well \u2026 comparisons to Neil Stephenson are spot on because by \u2018eck, he knows how to bang on without saying anything. My inner editor was at work on most pages boiling the verbosity down to what actually needs saying. This is not a crime of which Clarke can ever be accused \u2013 she wrote a book you could build houses with which just slips down the gullet.<\/p>\n

And for about the middle third I lost count of the number of times the narrator passes out, gets hit on the head or otherwise loses consciousness so that time can pass until he wakes up in bed and gets told yet another thing that he didn\u2019t actually notice happening. On four occasions characters have such overwhelming experiences of the fey that they spontaneously ejaculate. Once, maybe. Four times may be, how can I put it, over-egging the pudding?<\/p>\n

The descriptions of clocks and clockwork are beautiful and it\u2019s definitely a novel with a voice of its own. But as I drew near the end I began to feel that dread feeling, worthiness. This was no longer a pleasure, just a challenge, and I closed it with no real desire to read the sequel and see what happens next.<\/p>\n

I read it in the first place in self-defence, as I found the sequel in the library and it seemed alarmingly close to my uncompleted Napoleonic novel, provisionally titled N. This is definitively Napoleonic in that it features Napoleon as a key character: a Napoleon who has surrendered to the British and is doing what he hoped would be the case, living out his exile in the south of England. As this is so absolutely what everyone was determined would not happen, it\u2019s obvious even to the characters in the book that something has gone badly wrong, somewhere. Whoever perpetrated this couldn\u2019t hope to get away with it for long, therefore whatever is going to happen must be happening soon …<\/p>\n

(Full disclosure: I read somewhere that Napoleon hoped to live out his exile \u201con a small estate south of Oxford\u201d. As I live on a small estate south of Oxford \u2013 maybe smaller than the one he had in mind \u2013 I felt this was the novel I was destined to write. Whether it\u2019s a novel I\u2019m destined to complete remains to be seen. And it\u2019s sufficiently different to The Emperor of All Things<\/em> \u2013 the Emperor in that case being Time \u2013 that my concerns of rediscovering the wheel are assuaged.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Emperor of All Things, by Paul Witcover This is kind of proto-steampunk, in that being set in the mid-eighteenth century there isn\u2019t any steam in general use. Clockwork-punk might be closer to the mark. Beings native to the fourth … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":368,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4536","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4536"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4640,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4536\/revisions\/4640"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}