Steampunk: The Light Ages and (a bit of) The House of Storms

Much has already been said--sometimes in considerable exasperation--about Ian R. MacLeod's The Light Ages . As everyone noted when The Light Ages first appeared, the novel rewrites Charles Dickens' Great Expectations--which is also the kind of intertextuality one expects from neo-Victorian fiction.  Its sequel The House of Storms, by contrast, draws more on political iconography, especially the figure of Marianne (here, Marion), as well as the history of evolutionary thought; its historical referents are not quite so tied to Victorian literature, although it certainly took chutzpah to name its murderous protagonist after a reasonably mild-mannered Catholic poet and literary critic. 

Both novels are set in an England that is of some indeterminate chronological relationship to our own universe, although it has experienced many of the same historical crises.  But this England runs on magic, in the form of aether, an ethereal substance obtained by mining.  Society runs according to a strictly hieararchical caste system of guilds, beneath which lie the unaffiliated marts and, at the very bottom, the Changelings.  As it happens, aether frequently poisons those who use it or produce it, and the resulting Changelings not only undergo drastic (often horrifying) physical alterations but also develop greater rapport with the aether.  Simultaneously once human, more than human, and less than human, the Changelings are very much Kristeva's abject, treated with terror, disgust, and even awe.   At the level of deep plot structure, The Light Ages and The House of Storms are essentially the same novel: both are millennial; both represent utopias and radical political activism as, ultimately, doomed to disappointment and worse; both trace the violent failure, then ultimate reconstruction of a conservative social order.   Moreover, both turn in part on mysteriously "perfect" Changelings, Annalise (Anna) and Klade, who seem to have potentially redemptive powers.   Still, whereas The Light Ages turns history into a near-perfect cycle--society rebuilds itself on its old principles, thanks to the magic reset button at novel's end--The House of Storms concludes with the possibility of a new hierarchy, although whether or not it will be a great improvement is anybody's guess.  The relationship between the two novels could be described as typological, inasmuch as Anna's and Robert's unfulfilled potential is completed and transcended in Klade's and Marion's*; given that the Changelings rename themselves the Chosen, the religious overtones should be obvious. 

The Light Ages may rework many of Great Expectations' themes, but it also belongs to a recognizable Victorian genre: the Condition of England novel.  (Bruce Sterling's and William Gibson's The Difference Engine and Steven Brust's and Emma Bull's Freedom and Necessity are other examples of steampunked Condition of England fiction.)    On the one hand, it invites its readers to sympathize with the horrors experienced by the working classes, from the agonizing metamorphosis of Robert's mother into a "frail and disgusting creature" (72) to the torture of Missy Summerton (111-12) to the filthy bars smelling of "gin, piss and vomit" (137).  On the other hand, the entire narrative disallows anything resembling revolution; if this had been a Victorian novel, like North and South, Mary Barton, Hard Times, Shirley, Sybil, or Alton Locke, the plot would have moved towards a call for sympathetic identification between upper and lower classes, with the landed aristocracy and factory owners realizing their (usually paternalistic) obligations to the workers and the workers realizing that true egalitarianism is a pipe dream.  To the extent that the novel "proves" that radical revolution must fail, it follows in very Victorian footsteps.  But The Light Ages rejects the politics of sympathy altogether.  Instead, it represents the upper echelons of the guilds in nightmarish terms borrowed from both Dickens (think the Veneerings from Our Mutual Friend) and Wilde (think "The Harlot's House").  Even though Robert and Anna receive timely assistance from their friend and apparent sympathizer Sadie, daughter of the Greatgrandmaster of the Telegraphers, her intervention perpetuates suicide, murder, and mass revolt--not the reconciliation of the classes.  Robert's retreat into drug dreams at novel's end--very different from Pip's atonement through hard work and self-sacrifice--is also a retreat into an explicitly pre-political mindset, in which he returns to an idyllic excursion with his mother before everything begins (455-56).  The novel's pessimism about both radical action and the very possibility of sympathy tears down the religiously-inflected optimism of most Condition of England fiction; if the country seems headed anywhere at the end of this novel, it's Hell, not Heaven.  The fiery death of Missy Summerton (which, given the Great Expectation parallels, should come as no shock to anyone), which restores aether to the land and begins the new Age, also suggests a country racing to accept its damnation.**  There's no sign of redemption here.   

*--The end of the House of Storms revamps that of The Light Ages, with Marion taking a real journey into the unknown future as opposed to Robert taking a drug trip into the idealized past. 

**--I couldn't help idly wondering if this was a potshot at Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, in which the whole point is celebrating Dust instead of eliminating it.  The apotheosis of the Chosen in the second novel coincides with the near-total disappearance of aether, a change that Marion thinks will be good for mankind (455).