As the forces of good square off against the forces of evil, only an unassuming clockwork repairman and an octogenarian former superspy can save the world from total destruction.
Just as blithe in its disregard of verisimilitude and generic constraint, Angelmaker flits between old-fashioned villains in London's East End and covert action in 1940s south Asia, arranging its whistlestop plot around the modern-day discovery of a weapon of mass destruction in the unlikely form of a skepful of clockwork bees ... A stingier novelist could find material here for a decade's output, but Harkaway is anything but stingy. The miracle is that it all hangs together so well ...a hyperactive bit of storytelling, but despite all the hybridity and genre-bending, Angelmaker doesn't feel gimmicky ...a solid work of modern fantasy fiction, coupling credit-crunch anxiety with an understandable nostalgia for the mythical days of 'good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime.'
Harkaway plays the English language like a mad virtuoso: he hits all the right notes but isn’t above throwing in a bit of ornamentation and jazzing things up ... If you appreciate a well-constructed sentence and have a thing for fast-talking British muckety-mucks, then you should read Angelmaker for the writing alone ...like a Quentin Tarantino movie written by Neil Gaiman: larger-than-life characters, dry British humor, a heavy dose of the weird, and a bit macabre; horrendous things wrapped up in gorgeous language ...a great, action-packed book that doesn’t treat the reader like an idiot. Harkaway alludes to things and then goes off in some other direction, eventually circling back around to connect the dots.
...it [Angelmaker] fills our mundane globe with such a raft of hidden marvels and oddities that it transforms the known, miracle-devoid terrain into a marvelous and dangerous wonderland ... At the center of a large, entertaining cast of nonpareils and eccentrics, freaks and monsters, geniuses and idiots is one quite average, unassuming fellow... characters occupy a lively period from WWII to the present and frequent such outré venues... Harkaway has managed to recapture the lighthearted brio of an earlier age of precision entertainment, when the world was deemed to be perpetually teetering on the brink of Armageddon but always capable of being snatched back to safety with a quip, a wink, a judo chop, and the lurid highlights reflecting off Mrs. Peel’s leather catsuit.
