Clockwork Angels: The Novel (38 page)

Neil Peart

Photographs by Kevin J. Anderson

H
ere is a photograph I took of Kevin on the day he and I began seriously discussing the novelization of
Clockwork Angels
. It was August 17, 2010, and the setting was Mount Evans, Colorado. At 14,265 feet, Mount Evans is one of Colorado’s “fourteeners”— summits higher than 14,000 feet. Kevin lives in Colorado, and has climbed all fifty-four fourteeners, often with a recorder in his hand—while he hikes, he dictates chapters for upcoming novels. At that time I was on tour with Rush, with a day off between two shows at Red Rocks near Denver, so Kevin invited me to join him on one of the “tamer” fourteeners.

For something like twenty years, Kevin and I had discussed working on a project together that would marry music, lyrics, and prose fiction. The right idea and timing eluded us for a long time, but at last, both converged perfectly. It is as though that occasion had to wait until both of us were truly
ready
, as mature artists and—perhaps—as mature human beings, too.

I had started working on the lyrics in late 2009, and in early 2010 the band recorded the first two songs for the album, “Caravan” and “BU2B.” Several of the others were written by then, and I had the lyrics fairly well mapped out. I described to Kevin the basic skeleton of the plot and characters, and he had many wonderful ideas for expanding both. Kevin has unparalleled world-building and story-building skills, and he brought both fully to bear on this project. We started “framing” this alternate world, building its foundation, its infrastructure. We had to reinforce and develop my sketchy ideas on how alchemy might fit into the steampunk scenario—“the future as seen from the past,” from, say, the late nineteenth century, as imagined by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. What came to be known as the steampunk genre was partly pioneered by Kevin in his early fantasy writings—when, as he says, “We didn’t know there was a ‘thing’ to be part of.”

Steampunk is also sometimes described as “the future as it
ought
to have been,” for it often portrays a romantic and even utopian “alternative future.” I wanted that quality in this world—for it not to be a dystopia—and I believe that despite the Watchmaker’s oppressive rule, Albion is rather a
nice
place. And who wouldn’t want to visit Crown City and see the Clockwork Angels? (And breathe that heady colored smoke?)

On the story-building side, right away Kevin recognized the basic symbolic themes of the Watchmaker and the Anarchist— extreme order versus extreme freedom—which I had not consciously noted. Together we developed their characters and interactions, bridging my necessarily “brisk” plot points in the songs with connective tissue and richer details.

Over the next eighteen months, we continued to share ideas and suggestions—sometimes many times a day, and each of our “flights” would spark the other.

As my thirty-eight years with Rush will attest, I very much enjoy collaboration with like minded artists. Working up this story with Kevin was one of the easiest, yet most satisfying projects I have ever shared—easiest, because we almost always simply agreed with each other’s additions to the story, and most satisfying because I am so proud of the result.

The same applies to the contributions by Hugh Syme, whose art has glorified every piece of work bearing the band’s name, or my name, since 1975. From the very conception of the
Clockwork Angels
story, Hugh shared the “vision,” and between us we developed the wonderful illustrations he created, and which enrich this story so much. As always, if I could imagine it, he could picture it.

Voltaire’s
Candide
(1759) was an early model for the story arc: a philosophical satire about a naive, optimistic youth whose upbringing (“I was brought up to believe”) does not prepare him for the harrowing adventures that bring him to grief, disillusionment, and despair. Finally, Candide finds peace and wisdom on a farm near Constantinople, working in his garden.

First reading
Candide
in my twenties, I was amazed to discover that Voltaire was a philosopher with a sense of humor—the only one I know of even now, apart from Nietzsche (occasionally). Right from the beginning of
Candide
, the tale is woven with a needle of irony dipped in acid—sometimes only just keeping its clever head above sarcasm—and within a couple of pages you encounter a laugh-out-loud farcical scene being observed, where the “sage Dr. Pangloss” is in the woods, “giving a lecture in experimental philosophy” to a chambermaid, “a little brown wench, very pretty and very tractable.”

Voltaire’s story about Candide was delivered with a lighthearted, impish wit that, three centuries later, would inform John Barth’s picaresque play on the story,
The Sot-Weed Factor
—another little influence on the plot for
Clockwork Angels
.

The character of the Anarchist, perhaps a classic “screen villain,” was partly inspired by Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
, and by a character in Michael Ondaatje’s
In the Skin of a Lion
—two very different takes on anarchists, who can be either idealists who believe that humans don’t need leaders, or brutish, murderous sociopaths.

(Obviously those polarities resonate in our own timeline.) The carnival setting is drawn from Robertson Davies’s
World of Wonders
and the fine Beat-era novel by Herbert Gold,
The Man Who Was Not With It
.

The fascinating history of Spanish exploration in what is now the American Southwest was largely driven by an enduring legend of the Seven Cities of Gold. The setting was irresistible to me, and to Kevin, because we have both traveled widely, on wheels and on foot, in the Western deserts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. (Though I was not dictating books along the way.) Echoes are plain in the arches and other redrock formations of Southern Utah, the “Island in the Sky” in Canyonlands National Park, Acoma “Sky City” and the abandoned pueblos in New Mexico.

In contrast, the idea for the Wreckers came from another “Far West”—Cornwall, in England—drawn from some of Daphne du Maurier’s stories of that region, both fictional and historical. Years ago I read
Jamaica Inn
and others set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in that part of the world, and was appalled to think that people not only plundered wrecked ships without a care for rescuing survivors, but were so cold-blooded as to lure them to their dooms with false lights.

Two songs that were late additions to the album, “Halo Effect” and “Headlong Flight,” had their own stories. During our hike up Mount Evans, Kevin and I also talked about our own youths, and the kind of naïve illusions that had colored our histories. That became “Halo Effect.” In late 2011, my longtime friend and drum teacher, Freddie Gruber, passed away at age eighty-four. Near the end, he would rally briefly and entertain his friends and students gathered around with tales from his adventurous life—Manhattan in the forties, Vegas in the fifties, Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies and up to that day. Then he would shake his head and say, “I had quite a ride. I wish I could do it all again.”

I felt inspired to echo that lament in the song “Headlong Flight”—although I had never felt that way myself. To the contrary, as much as I appreciate and enjoy my life now, I remain glad I don’t have to do it all again.

That dichotomy is reflected in the ending of
Candide
. Dr. Pangloss continues to hold forth with his Spinoza-based “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” which Voltaire has been gleefully skewering throughout the novel. (I felt the same about Schopenhauer’s evil pronouncement that informs what Owen Hardy was “brought up to believe”: “Whatever happens to us must be what we deserve, for it could not happen if we did not deserve it.”
Outrageous!
)

In the final scene of
Candide
, the title character displays his impatience with philosophy and reveals the pragmatic wisdom he has attained. “Pangloss sometimes would say to Candide, ‘All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for, after all, had you not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunégonde, had you not been put into the Inquisition, had you not traveled across America on foot, had you not stabbed the Baron with your sword, had you not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado, then you wouldn’t be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.’