Review: A Clockwork River

A Clockwork River by J.S. Emery
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I bailed on this one at the 65% mark, after the level of fortunate coincidence passed what I could tolerate.

There seems to be a rule in effect in this book that you can either have agency or interiority, but not both. What I mean is that the chatty omniscient narrator gives us insight into the thoughts and feelings of some characters, who we therefore assume are the protagonists; but those characters don't protagonise. The only effectual action (at least, up to the 65% mark) comes from secondary characters or the villain and his minions, and even then, most of them aren't especially competent.

Sam, whose qualifications to be the primary protagonist seem to mainly consist of being a middle-class white guy, is so ineffectual that any attempt he makes to do anything only ever makes the situation worse, necessitating yet another rescue by a random character. He's what I call a Spoiled Protagonist (not that he's a protagonist, really); wherever he goes, people who should be attending to their own business down tools and leap to help him for no readily apparent reason, often rescuing him from the consequences of his own incompetence, and, if female, falling in love with him (he also falls in love with every woman he meets, immediately and superficially). Having been rescued, he soon manages to bungle things and deposit himself into another fix, and the cycle repeats with a new rescuer. This episodic structure reminded me of picaresque, but Sam is not picaresque; he's too hapless and useless, too much of a schlemiel. The author is forced to heap greater and greater amounts of "good luck" on him in order to keep him moving through the plot and not dying, and eventually I couldn't take it anymore.

Sam's sister Briony is, at least, trying a bit harder and showing more competence, but at the point I gave up she was shaping up to be more of a potential victim than a protagonist.

The adjective I kept thinking of for the relatively lightly-sketched setting is "Dickensian," which is not a compliment coming from me; I have no love for Dickens' grimy, run-down world. It also has lots of characters (many of them more-or-less-good-hearted scoundrels or eccentrics) and lots of words - though, to the author's credit, the pace didn't drag for me.

The pre-publication ARC I had from Netgalley also has many, many unnecessary coordinate commas, or, as the author would punctuate it, "unnecessary, coordinate commas". The author also doesn't know when to use commas before "who" or "which", or where to put the apostrophe when a possessive noun is plural. The copy editor has their work cut out for them, which is usually a predictor of a book that will be published with a lot of residual errors. The vocabulary is expansive, and includes some words that neither I nor my Kindle's dictionary knew, but I only spotted one clear error in vocabulary usage (the word "chit," which means a girl, used to refer to Sam when he was a child). It's probable that a lot of this will be fixed before publication, but again, even the best copy editor misses about 10% of the issues, and 10% of these issues is a lot.

The book did have some strengths; the numerous characters are distinct and memorable, it manages to be wordy without being dull, and the numerous subplots included some mysteries that I wanted to know the answer to. But I didn't want to know badly enough to trudge through more ineptitude from Sam, from which he would, no doubt, be rescued by increasingly unlikely coincidences.

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