The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle

(MIT Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

A never-used Douglas Adams Doctor Who script (later adapted into a novel) featured a cricket match interrupted by aliens. E.V. Odle’s 1923 novel The Clockwork Man begins similarly, with Dr Allingham’s determination to improve his declining batting average blown to pieces by the sudden appearance of a strange gesticulating figure. Concentration gone, Allingham loses his wicket. Meanwhile, young Arthur, nervously awaiting his turn in a game for which he is temperamentally unsuited, tries to start up conversation with the new arrival, struck by his odd appearance—red wig, brown bowler hat, flapping ears—without even the “vaguest marks of homely origin”. The “Clockwork Man” (as he introduces himself) invites himself into the game, knocks the ball all over the place, fails to run when called on, eventually does so in such a chaotic fashion that he is eventually run out, and whacks the umpire when ordered to leave the field, astonishing Allingham, Arthur, Gregg (the team captain) and the rest of the players and spectators.

There is something very English about the disruption of this cosy scene, and, given that Odle’s novel has been out of print for some time, we have no idea if Adams had ever read it.

MIT Press’s “Radium Age” book series features the novel as one of the many forays into science fiction by writers unassociated with the pulp magazine roots of the field. Odle was, for many years, editor the British magazine Argosy (not associated with the American magazine of the same name), and an associate of Virginia Woolf and brother-in-law of the literary writer Dorothy Richardson. His “Clockwork Man” is in fact a much more uncanny figure than the beginning might suggest: an enhanced human from the far future who has fallen through time to the present and whose own confusion mirrors that of those who encounter him. For him, ours is a “finite” world: “fixed laws—limited dimensions—essentially limited”. His world, in contrast, as Gregg later deduces, is one “of an immense speeding up of the entire organism…new senses and powers of apprehension” in which those powered by their “clocks” would “feel their way about in a larger universe, creep into all sorts of niches and corners unknown to us, because of their different construction”.

The beginning is comic, and there is comedy throughout such as the Clockwork Man’s encounter with a policeman who “never got beyond decimals” and has no idea what he’s talking about, or a curate who thinks the Clockwork Man is the conjuror booked for a children’s party. But the comedy is in great part the uncomfortable laughter arising during an encounter with something so strange that we cannot fully understand how we should react. The Clockwork Man’s physical and verbal ticks reflect his own dislocation in a world confined by five senses, space and time, and the certainty of death.

Annalee Newitz’s sensitive and informative introductory essay suggests that the encounter with the Clockwork Man shapes the possible destinies of two engaged couples (Allingham and Lilian, Arthur and Rose) who represent somewhat different relationships of gender roles. There is also the hint that the alien “makers” who have invented and inserted the “clocks” with which men of the future have been fitted have done so at the behest of the more “real” women. That reading is certainly one which makes this 1923 novel worth exploring almost a century later. But there is also a remarkably prescient examination of the nature of reality in this novel described on the back cover as “the first cyborg novel”. The last few pages—a conversation between the Clockwork Man and Arthur—are both chilling and poignant and, I think on re-reading them, something of a masterpiece. Another back-cover quotation (from a contemporary review) calls The Clockwork Man “a striking and original book”. It remains so.

Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.