Second novelty
The long wait for the follow-up to Hull author Steven Hall’s Raw Shark Texts has been more than worth it.
one of the finest Doctor Who Big Finish audio dramas, A Death in the Family, pitting the Time Lord against a “Word Lord” called Nobody No-One who can disguise himself in language.
Well, the wait is over. I read Maxwell’s Demon in proof in 2019, publication was delayed because of the pandemic, and it is now here. I re-read it in the finished copy and it was more than worth the wait, and rewarded being read twice. I found even more traps, foreboding foreshadowings, dialogue that reveals its true importance only in retrospect, sly references and clever sleights of hand. It is also – ingeniously – about a long-awaited difficult second novel.
The protagonist is Thomas Quinn, a man whose life had been blighted by wanting the respect of his late father, a veritable
“man of letters.” He never showed any interest in Quinn’s sole novel, The Qwerty Machinegun, but gave a rare public endorsement to a book, Cupid’s Engine, by his assistant, the mysterious Andrew Black, an erstwhile friend of Thomas.
Cupid’s Engine was a bestseller that also spawned obsessive fan sites dedicating to cracking all its mysteries, and worse than that, Quinn knows it is the better book.
He’s eking out a living writing promotional franchise tie-ins, and at the outset is in the doldrums as his wife Imogen is on a research trip to Easter Island, investigating catastrophic collapse, and their only contact is through a time-lagged webcam.
Then he gets – or rather, misses – a phone call that seems to be from the deceased Stanley, with the cryptic message “Why knocks an angel in Bethlehem?” This is only the beginning of the weirdness. Quinn seems to see the villain of Black’s novel skulking in the streets, Black sends him a photograph of an impossible black sphere, a random diversion leads him to a Nativity scene in an abandoned church and worst of all, he divulges that he knows that Black had written a second novel, Maxwell’s Demon.
Quinn’s financial woes will be solved if he can procure the book, and deal with Black, who is more than a recluse: he refuses to have anything to do with digital texts, has reneged on his contract, and might have an inkling about the End of Days.
It moves at an exhilarating lick, as befits its pop culture propensities, but with highbrow sensibilities, its concerns including the Kabbalah, whether the world is made of words, the origins of the alphabet, the mythopoetic nature of the hero’s journey and what angels look like.