Angelmaker

Angelmaker isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's a lot of fun. A story of a man rebuking his father's criminal past by living a straight-and-narrow lifestyle, of an aged former spy trying to stop a Doomsday Device, and a mysterious order of monks.

Nick Harkaway names his protagonist "Joe Spork," and then never comments on the name further, other than to lay out Joe's ancestry (father, career criminal, mother, joined a convent within the past ten years, grandfather, a clockmaker and artisan, grandmother, mysteriously absent.) Joe's ancestry sets up a tension that's central to his chapters: his repudiation of his father's criminal ways, and his embracing his grandfather's honest living, makes it tougher for him to deal with the problems that crop up throughout the course of the novel; what to do when you need information, and your best sources of that are from a past where your father was a notorious gangster?

Unfortunately, this dilemma is more or less all the characterization we get on our protagonist, who is overshadowed by supporting characters, such as the elderly former spy, her cartoonish nemesis, and an underworld figure or two. We even get a love interest who's nearly as much of a blank slate as Joe is. Luckily, this isn't a deep, psychological novel where that would be a killing blow; it's pulpy fun, and that's merely a minor negative here.