Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Escapement by Lavie Tidhar

The Escapement, Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon 978-1-61696-327-9, $16.95, 256pp, tp) September 2021.

In the most exuberant sense of the word, Lavie Tidhar is something of a literary magpie, borrow­ing from – and celebrating – a dizzying variety of narrative traditions. His previous novel, By Force Alone, enlisted everything from Macbeth to Roadside Picnic in the service of radically reinventing Arthurian legends. The Escapement is if anything even more radical. In a brief after­word, Tidhar cites sources as unusual as Dr. Seuss, Gilgamesh, Greek mythology, a Hebrew fairy tale, and even John Clute’s theory of horror (in The Darkening Garden). Many readers are likely to suspect that Stephen King’s The Dark Tower also belongs on the list, given the vaguely Western-like setting called the Escapement and the central characters known only as The Stranger and The Kid. But Tidhar’s cultural palimpsest includes far more than literary sources. As with King, Sergio Leone westerns loom large in the background, but so do silent film comedies, classic Surreal­ist images (Dali’s melting clocks, Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup), Tarot decks, ancient novelty songs like “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”, and most of all the weird pop-horror mythology of clowns, circuses, aerialists, and mimes. Even the serial killer John Wayne Gacy makes an ap­pearance, in the guise of the monstrous Pogo the Clown (the name he actually used in his charitable performances).

As with A Man Lies Dreaming, probably his boldest and best earlier novel, Tidhar frames and grounds his more fantastical inventions in a tale of real human suffering. In that novel, an improb­able noir alternate history featuring Hitler as a failing private eye in 1939 London may all be the dream of a Jewish writer in Auschwitz. The Escapement opens with, and periodically returns to, an unnamed man tending to his apparently dying son in a grimly sterile modern hospital. In the phantasmagorical world of the Escapement, he becomes The Stranger, who is on a quest to find something called the Flower of Heartbeat or the Ur-Shanabi, but who is faced by endless distractions and adventures. After he discovers a group of slaughtered clowns (“this is clown country,” we’re reminded) and sets out to find the outlaws who did it, he finds himself allied with an equally enigmatic figure called The Kid and a rather glamorous piano-playing bounty hunter named Temperanza. Later they meet up with a variety of colorful characters such as tinkerers, a tough war veteran, an engineer, a band of train-robbing aerialists, a Conjurer, and a preacher, each with their own tales and obsessions. Aided by one of the more useful and coherent maps I’ve seen in a recent fantasy novel, we can follow their progress through a dangerous town called Kellysburg, into a region called the Thickening (borrowed from Clute’s four-part structure for horror tales) toward Jericho, and beyond, past a giant hole in the ground, toward the Mountains of Darkness – all while the nameless man paces the white corridors of his child’s hospital, seeking reasons for hope.

Providing an apocalyptic background to all this is an ongoing war among gods called the Titanomachia, drawn from the Greek myth, which may account for the unpredictable shifts in time and space that sometimes disrupt the Escapement, and may have something to do with the recurring “symbol storms” that deposit everything from ankhs and punctuation marks to those Surrealist objects mentioned earlier. There are moments when The Escapement itself feels like such a storm, furiously inventive and wildly eclectic, with radical shifts in tone to match. One page may read like a Keystone Kops scenario – “The man on the unicycle shot forward, hit a trampoline, bounced up into a full aerial cartwheel, and landed improbably on his face in a custard pie that had been lying there” – followed a few pages later by “In all this world only the boy was still and unchanged. The machines monitored his heart rate and his blood pressure, fed him liquids, evacuated waste.” As with A Man Lies Dreaming, these “real-world” passages collectively amount to only a fragment of the novel, but the resonance they create can be stun­ning. Among the most visual and even cinematic of Tidhar’s novels (Chaplin and Fellini come to mind, as well as Leone and maybe even Jodorowski), it’s also, in the end, a surprisingly touching reminder of how such quests can begin in heartbreak.

This review and more like it in the August 2021 issue of Locus.

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