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Pasquale’s Angel by Paul J. McAuley, Gollancz, pp 286, £15.99

If Leonardo da Vinci had been able to put some of his more advanced
ideas into practice, the history of the past 400 years would have been somewhat
different. Imagine early 16th-century Florence with steamboats, submarines
and electric light. How would the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution
have coped with each other?

Unfortunately, this is something that doesn’t really come through in
Paul J. McAuley’s latest novel. All the elements are there – the politics,
pageantry, costume and easy death of the Renaissance, and the technology
(pollution included) of the 19th century – but it somehow doesn’t mesh.
Both were periods of new ideas, of excitement, of change; the combination
should be electric, but Pasquale’s Angel reads like a period detective
story with the industrial elements imposed on top.

In genre terms, it is as much a starstudded detective story as an alternative
history; the luminaries include Pope Leo X, Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo
(the Great Engineer) himself. One of Raphael’s men is killed in a classic
locked-room case; the unlikely young hero Pasquale, a pupil-artist, is recruited
by the journalist Niccol Machiavegli to help investigate the murder and
to do on-the-spot illustrations for his broadsheet. Pasquale pockets a model
helicopter powered by rubber band that he finds by the body, and precipitates
an avalanche of kidnappings, torture and further murders.

Pasquale is guided into the beginnings of mysticism by a Native American
woman who believes he can stand between the two worlds, ‘the world of things
and the world of the names of things, where their essence lies’. Sadly,
this neo-Platonic hermeticism – intellectually one of the most exciting
aspects of the development of the philosophy of science – becomes buried
beneath the political complexities of the novel.

Despite McAuley’s excellent imagination and his detailed research,
Pasquale’s Angel, like his last couple of novels, is almost, but not quite,
brilliant. It’s not helped by the clumsiness of his prose. The book is littered
with verbless sentences (stylistically allowable, but grammatically dodgy),
subordinate clauses linked to the wrong noun, cliches (‘The man squealed
like a stuck pig’), and repetitions. By the sixth reference to someone dragging
someone else ‘by main force’, I wished he had had a firmer editor.

David Barrett edited Digital Dreams, a collection of science fiction
short stories about computers, and is secretary of the Arthur C. Clarke
Award for Science Fiction.