Clockwork or All Wound Up Book Review

Book Review

Title: Clockwork -or All Wound Up
Author: Phillip Pullman

I just recently discovered Phillip Pullman while doing research on the Whitbread Children's Book Awards. His fantasy novel (for children? young adults? adults?) The Amber Spyglass won the award for both Best Children's Literature and the over all Book of the Year Award in 2001. That novel is the third in the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Clockwork is a much shorter, perhaps less ambitious work, but in many ways just as complex. The story takes place in a German town, "in the old days..." when "...time used to run by clockwork." It is the evening before the unveiling of the next great mechanical figure for the town's famous clock. Everyone in town gathers at the local inn, including the Clock Maker's apprentice, whose clockwork figure will be his "graduation" present to the town, and the local story teller.

Karl, the apprentice clockmaker confesses to Fritz the story teller, that he has failed to complete his clockwork figure, that he indeed has nothing at all to offer for the unveiling the following day. He is despondent and speaks of killing himself before the sun comes up.

So the book begins, or one part of the book, as there are layers here: stories within stories, like the complex workings of a mechanical clock. Fritz the story teller is a the inn that night to read his next great novel aloud, a story which we learn he has not finished but hopes be able to come up with an ending as he goes along.

Fritz is known for his horror tales, and the already scary story he begins takes a particularly chilling turn when a sinister character from his tale shows up at at the Inn. And so the book ticks along - there is a Faustian offer to Karl, and acceptance that leads to the inevitable doom of the apprentice clockmaker. And of course there is hope and redemption for the town through the good hearts of the children in the book.

Along with a somewhat fairytale quality to it, Clockwork has elements of suspense and horror. This was the most "creaped out" I have been with a children's book since first reading Coraline by Neil Gaimon.

Highly recommend this book for children ages 11 to adult (if they are not too easily scared...)