Book 32: The Dream of Perpetural Motion

Author: Dexter Palmer
Dates read: April 27, 2010 - June 5, 2010 (40 days)
Pages: 338

Well, I’m now woefully behind schedule since I’ve been very busy and I was also very wrong about my guess as to how long this novel would take me to read. The steampunk nature of the novel combined with the bizarre concept intrigued me enough to put it at the top of my reading list.

Harold Winslow is writing his memoirs aboard a zeppelin powered by a perpetual motion machine that houses himself and the one woman he’s ever loved, Miranda Taligent, as its only living passengers. A staff of mechanical men operate the necessary components to keep the zeppelin functioning, and all of these tin men, the zeppelin itself, and the perpetual motion machine were the invention of Miranda’s brilliant but mad father, Prospero. As Harold puts down his life story in three distinct segments, he describes the most formative moments of his life, which also happen to chronicle his involvement with the Taligents from the time he first met Miranda, to the time he spent with her inside the hyper-advanced Tower she was never allowed to leave, to the day he murdered Prospero in order to board the zeppelin in the hopes of saving Miranda from her father’s extreme measures of keeping her pure.

This book creates an alternate twentieth century that is both old-fashioned and advanced, a steampunk city that is incredibly vivid and fascinating. Prospero’s inventions throughout the book range from frivolous to amazing to deeply disturbing, but they are the heart of the city and the power this affords him makes him a very interesting antagonist. There are tons of stories within stories, and while everything is told from Harold’s perspective as he recounts his life story, there are pieces inserted from other characters’ writings to give a greater picture of the world Harold lives in. I did have one large complaint though, which is that the book is broken into so many small sections that it’s difficult to feel a sense of narrative momentum. Many sections are no longer than a couple pages, and a good portion of those are just a couple paragraphs, meaning you’re constantly coming to the end of a section, and jumping into a different aspect of the narrative so often makes it difficult to feel a focused story within all the information bombarding you. While this does feel like it’s purposeful given that one of the most prominent themes of the book is destructive interference (the concept that for every sound, there is an exact opposite of that sound that would effectively cancel it out and create nothingness rather than noise), the most engaging portion of the novel is the last fifty or so pages when it becomes its most narrative. At that point, the events are escalating to the climax in such a way that the tension isn’t broken by segments outside of the linear events, though there are a couple of tales within the last chapters that are told to Harold by other characters, but these tales contribute to the suspense because they’re directly related to the outcome of the story. Overall, the book is very engaging, especially given how consistently and incredibly visual it is, and the main story of the novel is amazing, but I think it would benefit from being just a bit more linear in the telling.