If you’re really quick, you can get this book from Penguin in 10 weekly paperback chunks for £25. They’re serlialising it in a Dickens manner, before publishing it in hardback in January (for less than £25).
Obviously, if I’ve read the book, I’ve done none of these things – it was published in the States in August and I read the American edition.
But on to the novel itself. It’s a Victorian world, set in, well a kind of England, although that’s never specified, even if there are many English names littered around the place. None of the places exist, and the geography doesn’t quite make sense. Other parts of Europe are mentioned however, since many of the characters come from these places.
We follow three characters – Miss Temple, the Cardinal, and Dr Svenson as they take on the forces of mysterious cabal who seem to have developed some kind of technology with dastardly powers.
If that last sentence makes the plot sound like hokum, well then, that’s because it is. There is much chasing around the “city” and the countryside, with strange parties at mansions, sinisters doctors and femme fatales.
At 700 pages, there’s quite a lot of things going on, but at times it felt like the book’s universe needed opening up a little. And there was far too much of people getting knocked out and coming around unguarded in a locked room or whatever. I suspect that much of this is to give a certain pastiche feel to the book, but at times it can be a little tiring.
However, you do care about the characters and each of the ten very long chapters leaves you on a cliffhanger that almost certainly won’t resolved for many pages to come as we jump to another of the three protaganists.
So overall, I’d probably wait for the paperback, unless you fancy a quite collectible series of paperbacks now.