Beth Cato’s Clockwork Duology Compellingly Evokes Real History
Not all steampunk books are alternate histories. Some are fantasy worlds tinged with Victoriana or magic (or both). Sometimes the period signifiers stretch out of the Victorian era: back to the Regency, ahead to the first World War. Sometimes it’s not an industrial revolution, but a far future analog with brass worlds and spaceships clanking with steam. It’s pretty elastic, as a genre. But even in alternate steampunk worlds, there’s an invocation of alternate history, gestures to the shift to modernity through setting and ornament. The history humming through Beth Cato’s The Clockwork Crown is the Crimean war (and, to a lesser extent, World War I): messy, ugly conflicts with no clear origin and a tragic reliance on an outmoded understanding of technology (and society, really). Failing empires, withering royal families, and mud-filled trenches are the backdrop for a heroine’s coming of age.
The Clockwork Clown is the completion of a duology that began with The Clockwork Dagger. Both novels follow the young medician Octavia Leander, a healer whose powers rely on magic, from her first tentative steps into adulthood, to a reckoning with her growing powers. The sequel starts right where the first book ends, with Octavia and her protector and friend Alonzo Garrett racing across the border of her country, Caskentia, and into the dubious sanctuary of the nation to the south. Alonzo, though his family is from this southern country, and has the dark skin of its people, was born and raised in Caskentia. His divided allegiances and feelings of estrangement often mirror and complement Octavia’s, and her interactions with his family illuminate her character.
Caskentia has been at war with what they call the Waste for more than a generation, a war with origins that are murky and contested. Octavia and Alonzo, captured by Wasters at the end of the last novel, escaped due to the intervention of the Lady, a cryptic figure from whom all of Octavia’s considerable healing powers originate. From there, they work to investigate Octavia’s changing abilities and gifts, but are thwarted by both ignorance and avarice. While on the trail of some books about the origins of the Lady and medicians, they have to negotiate with a man who has done some truly horrific things in blending magic and science.
The tension between magic and technology is a recurring theme, as Octavia’s identity as a magical healer (versus a doctor who heals with technology) is treated very differently by the different cultures of her world. Caskentia used her as a battlefield medician, but didn’t pay her for her work; the government is more or less in shambles. The average Caskentian mistrusts magic, but mobs her when they see her real results. The Wasters claim to revere the Lady—and the Tree, where the Lady resides, is said to be in the Waste—but the government there seeks to use her powers in a genocidal attack on Caskentia, one Octavia understandably wants no part in. The mad scientist blends them horrifically.
Even though Octavia is a magic worker who believes in the source of her magic, that faith is tested over and over again, as the origins and motivations of the Lady and the Tree are as murky as those of the war. I was somewhat frustrated by the Lady in the first novel: I, like Octavia, didn’t understand how her magic functioned, and the Lady seemed often capricious and cruel. Indeed, one of the things I find so winning about Octavia is her incredible compassion. When her enemies are hurt, she tends to them, as well as to her friends and strangers. She’s not a sap; she knows, the way doctors do, that triage is often necessary. The Clockwork Crown answered both my questions, and Octavia’s, and provided a very satisfying conclusion to an excellent duology.