A horological adventure that’s sure to make time fly

The Clockwork Conspiracy

368pp, Bloomsbury, T £7.99 (0844 871 1514), ebook £6.39 ★★★★★

Older readers may remember Rupert and the Trouble with Big Ben (1986), in which the Great Clock of the Palace of Westminster starts ticking out of time, and must beg Rupert the Bear and Bill Badger for 2p to put on its pendulum, so that its precision can be restored.

Having survived that indignity, “Big Ben” is in trouble again. The plot of The Clockwork Conspiracy, Sam Sedgman’s first solo novel, centres on Isaac Turner, who lives with his father Diggory, the chief horologist in charge of the Great Clock. We begin on a cloudy October night, when Isaac climbs the tower to the belfry and finds that his father has vanished, leaving behind only a shattered pocket-watch, “the one he never took off ”, and a cryptic message: “Dial south. Nine chains a chapter. The hour points the way.”

Isaac suspects that his father’s disappearance is linked to rumours of an Orwellian proposal to decimalise time: “Instead of 24 hours a day, there would be 10. There would be 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute… it was supposed to make things simpler.” And when he stumbles into a sinister government plot, he finds himself trying to save not only his father, but time itself.

Sedgman says in his author’s note that clocks have been his lifelong passion, and the book contains plenty of detail for the budding horologist: “With every swing of the pendulum, the main weight clicked a fraction lower in the tower, its slow descent giving energy to the going train.” In lesser hands, such information might seem weighty. But Sedgman ensures that every detail forms part of the plot’s neat puzzle, which the methodical reader will enjoy piecing together.

Sedgman is hitherto best known for his Adventures on Trains series, co-written with MG Leonard, in which an 11-year-old boy goes travelling with his uncle: “The locomotive sighed out a puff of steam, as if it were alive – a dragon, ancient, powerful, and ready to fly.” The Clockwork Conspiracy, for eight-to-12-year-old readers, draws on the same winning formula: a rapid adventure, combined with an encyclopaedic focus on a particular subject – and an ability to make it sing.