Yes, I know what I said back in November in my post reviewing Ganymede; after I’d finished Crime and Punishment, I’d go and read a book by China Miéville to make up for picking another book at Waterstones. In the end, however, I didn’t manage to do this, for two reasons:
1) I’m weak-willed and terrified of commitment.
2) Ack-Ack Macaque has a monkey holding guns on its cover. You can’t blame me for wanting that.
Long and the short of this book is this; Ack-Ack Macaque is pretty damn good and definitely worth your time. So good I read it in two days flat, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
The plot of the book is interesting, if complex; without going into detail and risking spoiling things, there’s a conspiracy by a computer company, a soul-stealing serial killer, the threat of a nuclear war, the heir to the British throne going on the run and a sweary, daiquiri-swilling, cigar-smoking monkey who’s suffering an existential crisis. Despite the multitude of narrative threads, Gareth L. Powell manages to tie them all together very effectively, and in a manner that’s both surprising and yet makes perfect sense.
As well as the titular character of Ack-Ack Macaque himself, a monkey turned Spitfire pilot who is Brtain’s last hope in a steampunked-up version of World War Two, the book is populated by a small but interesting cast of characters; Victoria, a journalist who underwent reconstructive surgery of immense scale after a helicopter crash and now exists as a cyborg, Prince Merovech, the runaway heir to the British throne, his lover and Digital Rights Activist Julie, and the computer hacker and Ack-Ack Macaque’s wingwoman, Mindy/K8 (it’s complicated). While Ack-Ack Macaque himself is a hugely fun character to read, with a boisterous, larger than life personality that seems to explode from the page, I found Victoria was probably the most interesting, well-developed and complex character of the entire cast; the effects of the accident and her subsequent reconstruction, which has left more than half of her brain as synthetic ‘gelware’ are explored in great detail, and even though she’s more machine than woman she still retains a great deal of complexity and humanity throughout the novel. Conversely, however, Mindy/K8 feels rather undeveloped for a key character who is prevalent for a pretty big chunk of the novel; I can describe her as ‘chipper’ but that’s about it, really, and considering how well developed the other charcters are that issue does stand out rather.
It bears noting that the worldbuilding of the novel is truly stellar; going for a style touted as ‘Monkeypunk’, a good part of is set in an alternate universe in the year 2059, where Britain and France merged in the 1950s to form a new global superpower. Taking influence from Steampunk and Cyberpunk alike, the setting is well realised and detailed, its technologies and politics are key to the plot and is also an interesting exercise in flexing the old ‘what if’ muscles. I’ve no idea if Powell plans to write any more works in the setting, but if he does I’d certainly be interested to see it explored further.
If the book has a major problem, it’s probably that it simply has too many ideas going on at once. Powell manages to effectively tie them up by the end of the book, but there is so much going that the book feels like it’s rushing at points in order to get things done. In some ways, it’s a good thing, as the book gets a breathlessly intense pacing from it, but at the same time it’s trying to do and resolve so very much that there never feels like the characters have any time to breathe; almost every chapter has some kind of revelation, twist or big reveal, and while they’re all interesting it does mean that the characters themselves don’t get as much room to flex their muscles as I feel they should have had. Yes, I can appreciate that some books have a certain pacing in order to convey a message (Crime and Punishment is so slow you can feel the pages calcify under your fingers as you read them, though that’s for the purpose of holding up a mirror to the reader of Raskolknikov’s own restlessness and frustration at his situation and shut up I’m allowed to be pretentious every once in a while!) but in this case it doesn’t seem to have any metatextual purpose.
Still, Ack-Ack Macaque is an excellent read; it’s intelligent, well-written and a lot of the time, is pure fun. If you can only get two books this month, get Ack-Ack Macaque, and get it twice.
Verbal Fisticuffs 