The Affinity Bridge

London in 1901 is a place of many marvels. Airships fill the skies, steam-powered carriages race through the streets, clockwork automata fill a range of occupations from domestic servants to airship pilots, and Queen Victoria has not died in January but still reigns in November, kept alive by extraordinary mechanical means.

Sir Maurice Newbury, museum researcher, freelance adventurer and special agent to the Crown, wholeheartedly embraces the technological progress of the age; his newly hired assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, is not so sure and remains more comfortable with horse-drawn carriages than with the frantic energy of steam.

However, several forces are undermining London's triumphant technology. A mysterious plague has led to attacks by "revenants"—zombies, for all intents and purposes—that are on the verge of sending the city into a panic. When called in to assist Scotland Yard in solving a series of murders attributed to a possibly supernatural figure, a "glowing policeman," Newbury is diverted by the queen herself to investigate an airship crash that has killed all on board and may be the fault of a malfunctioning automation pilot.

Newbury and Hobbes' investigation leads to uneasy encounters with the brilliant but amoral French scientist who developed the automatons and the egotistical industrialist who markets them. Additional murders ensue, unexpected connections emerge, and with each new revelation Newbury and Hobbes find themselves in greater and greater peril, circumstances that lead to a climactic encounter with the forces that threaten not only the day-to-day safety of London but also the continuation of the Empire itself.

Uneven but ultimately entertaining

The Affinity Bridge opens with a prologue set in India that promises a full-tilt monster extravaganza, but the opening chapters of The Affinity Bridgel set up what appears to be a kind of clockwork cozy, a deliberately placed historical mystery featuring clever and oh-so-civilized detectives who methodically search for clues in a carefully delineated steampunk London. These detectives, Newbury and Hobbes, are very balanced characters. Newbury's investigative skills and unswerving loyalty to the Crown are leavened by a taste for morbidly exotic supernatural lore and narcotics, not necessarily in that order. Veronica's plucky, can-do persona includes a devotion to a sister, confined to a mental hospital, whose diagnosed insanity is actually clairvoyance, and thoughtful reservations about the "progress" that Newbury endorses. As The Affinity Bridge unfolds, the characters become increasingly engaging.

The final third of The Affinity Bridge, however, is decidedly un-cozy and a bit of a jumble. On the one hand, Mann's seamless connection of the disparate plot lines—zombies, malfunctioning automata and "glowing policemen"—leads to a complete and satisfying resolution. On the other hand, the connections occur within a pileup of pitched battles and hair's-breadth escapes—before it's all over, both Newbury and Hobbes are, in separate violent encounters, literally hanging by their fingertips. These Perils-of-Pauline episodes, combined with what is arguably a bit too much devotion throughout to the tone of a Victorian adventure narrative ("Together the two men fled Scotland Yard, both of them hoping that, if Veronica had found herself in any danger, they would not be too late to come to her aid."), may leave readers wondering whether the author offers the story as tribute, a parody or a combination of both.

Overall, though, the novel's virtues certainly outweigh its flaws. The Affinity Bridge is a carefully plotted and entertaining steampunk mystery, and Sir Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes emerge as engaging characters readers are likely to want to see again—a desire the publisher promises to fulfill with a sequel, The Osiris Ritual, announced for 2009.

If the setting of The Affinity Bridge is your cup of Earl Grey, be sure to check out the excellent anthology Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tachyon Publications, 2008).

-—Brett