Joe finds himself unwittingly caught up in a race to save existence itself, but will doing so mean he has to assume the long-put-off mantle of Mathew 'Tommy Gun' Spork? Joe and Edie are just two players in a vast story of doomsday devices, clockwork bees, shady anti-terrorist government agencies, even shadier eastern supervillains, creatively vicious serial killers, submarines, spy trains, and Tosher's Beat, a secret criminal transport network underneath London.

Edie has a tangled history, the uncovering of which is one of the chief pleasures of Nick Harkaway's novel.īecause, frankly, simple plot synopsis quails in the face of Angelmaker. To their astonishment, she dispatches them with sublime skill and goes on the run with her beloved blind pug Bastion, who has two pink marbles for eyes. This is debatable, especially when two thugs show up at her house to assassinate her. She sent Joe the device without telling him that it is potentially very dangerous indeed, and now wonders if she's done the right thing. The book has indeed been fixed by Joe – though he doesn't know it yet, thinking it just another automaton – for nonagenarian Edie Banister. All three are after a kind of clockwork book they believe Joe has recently repaired. Life is capricious'), then by the even scarier hooded monk Brother Sheamus of the Ruskinites, an order once devoted to finding the divinity of God through the perfection of engineering but now gone strangely apocalyptic. Joe's workshop is visited first by vaguely threatening civil servants Cummerbund and Titwhistle ('Those are our actual names, I'm afraid.

His son wants none of that, though he has begun to worry that his life has grown too quiet and is edging, perhaps, into an unliveable emptiness. Chairman of the 'Night Market', a joyous, criminal version of Portobello Road, Mathew ran scams, cons and thefts, was loudly adored by friends and associates, and kept his trademark Tommy gun well oiled and ready for use. This decidedly calm life is all part of the enormous effort Joe has put into staying out of the shadow of the late Mathew Spork, an East End gangster whose skill was matched only by his flamboyance. Like his beloved grandfather before him – but, importantly, not like his father – Joe fixes clocks and clockwork devices. J oshua Joseph Spork is a big man with a quiet job.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway