Review: Of Gilded Flesh

Of Gilded Flesh by Gordon Gravley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"People with Issues who sleep with other people even though they know it's a bad idea, because Issues" is a long way from the centre of what I enjoy, which is part of why this gets three stars from me. However, the pre-release review version I had from Netgalley also needed quite a bit of work. Like many authors (especially, but not solely, those based in the US), this author confuses nobility and royalty, and doesn't get terms of address for nobles - or, I think, churchmen - correct. The 18th-century Austro-Hungarian nobles in this book also seem to be able to commit crimes up to and including attempted murder against commoners with nobody even considering for a moment that they might possibly be held to account for it, and to be able to detain and execute them arbitrarily without process of law, which I have to say I found a bit difficult to believe. And the text has quite a few errors of vocabulary, fumbled idioms, and missing words in sentences.

The narration is, for no obvious reason, in present tense, except for one scene which drops, again for no obvious reason, into past before the present tense resumes.

And the deus ex machina (or possibly machina ex deus) near the end wasn't adequately foreshadowed, in terms of the level of magic displayed; up until then we'd just had clockwork that was ahead of anything possible today (let alone in the 18th century), but I was willing to accept that as the speculative element. The addition of another and much more powerful bit of outright magic didn't work for me, espeically since it was introduced more or less stealthily and without immediate explanation.

The ending, I felt, took a dark, brooding narrative in which several people with significant issues were creating their own tragedy and tied it up in a nice, neat happy ending with everything suddenly resolved. I'm not saying I wanted a tragic ending - I didn't - but it was a jarring change of direction nonetheless, and too abrupt.

What was good, though, was that there was some representation of disability - the clockmaker at the centre of the story crafts prostheses for several people, including himself, and there is at least some examination of what it's like to be disabled and make your way through life dealing with that every day.

It shows promise, but it doesn't show polish, and I felt some aspects of it hadn't been thought through enough or didn't ring true.

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