The Clockwork Man Read online

  Odle even offers a prescient hint at the “uncanny valley,” a term from robotics that describes the feeling of revulsion and hilarity inspired by robots who look almost, but not quite, human. Today the expression is often used to explain why people love cartoonish robots but recoil from ones that look realistic. When our characters first observe the Clockwork man, he’s gone glitchy. He seems like a regular man, but he’s spouting odd phrases and stumbling awkwardly through an English village’s cricket match. Something about the para-humanity of the Clockwork man’s demeanor makes people burst into laughter, or throw up—or bite their lips to prevent both.

  This brings me back to the comical nature of the Clockwork man. As the conservative Allingham observes, humanity’s most pernicious defense against change is an ability to turn anything into a joke. Allingham could practically be quoting from social theorist Leo Löwenthal, who, in the 1949 book Prophets of Deceit, would argue that satire is one of the preferred rhetorical moves of reactionaries. Given The Clockwork Man’s rich political subtext, it’s worth thinking about how its eponymous character functions as an operative from a possible authoritarian future.

  When Allingham stops laughing, he views the Clockwork man’s future as frighteningly unimaginable. But his young friend Gregg points out that “the clock” isn’t terribly different from 1920s London. When the two men stumble across the cyborg’s lost hat, they find a tag inside from Dunn & Co., a popular men’s clothing manufacturer in 1923—which, in the Clockwork man’s future, has been a going concern for two thousand years. (The real-life Dunn & Co. closed its doors in the 1970s.) Gregg realizes that immortal life inside the clock has allowed men to perpetuate ancient institutions long after they would have naturally perished in the real world.

  There’s an inherent conservatism in the Singularity, that is to say, which allows men to transcend time—only to foreclose the possibility of future changes. Not only has Odle invented the idea of the Singularity, then, but he’s also the first to critique its reactionary tendencies. The virtual-reality “clock” offers not true progress but instead mass replication of the present. Today, it would seem that this critique has been lost. Kurzweil and his fellow Singularitarians look forward to a techno-utopia, not the Clockwork man’s virtual world ruled by fascist consumerism.

  Must humankind be stuck in an endless cycle of slavery and revolt, like the robots in R.U.R.? Can we instead take steps to dismantle authoritarian hierarchies? Odle leaves room for a future in which the majority of humans opt to stay “real,” by shunning the Singularity in favor of genuine social transformation. How do we get there? We’ll start by reimagining marriage, his novel suggests, and we’ll continue by confining toxic masculinity to a world of infinite wigs.

  Even The Clockwork Man’s narrative construction challenges old hierarchies: It’s a book on the boundary between pulp and literature, low and high culture. Odle inhabited the same space. In 1926, he became the first editor of the popular British literary magazine The Argosy (not to be confused with the American pulp magazine of the same name), which specialized in reprinting short stories by luminaries like Conrad, Wells, and Wilde. When Odle began his fourteen-year tenure as editor of The Argosy, the magazine was devoted to literature—but it was published in pulp-sized format. So it would have looked like Weird Tales (or the American Argosy) despite featuring stories by esteemed literary authors. As pulp magazine historian Mike Ashley told me, it became one of Britain’s best-selling magazines. Odle’s genius was in bringing literary tropes to the masses, and pulp tropes into the drawing rooms of avant-garde Bloomsbury creatives.

  Fittingly, the final chapter of The Clockwork Man is a pulpy showdown between a robot from the future and a startled human couple . . . and, at the same time, a modernist anti-ending that sprouts an ambiguous web of possibilities and perspectives. Like a pulp fiction writer, Odle gives us a grotesque future jammed with aliens, robots, and Einsteinian wonders; but like a literary modernist, he refuses to define that as the only pathway to tomorrow. The novel’s key revelation is that the Clockwork man is just one possible future for humanity. We won’t all be imprisoned by “the clock” while being told that we’ve been liberated; many humans exist in the “real” world.

  Although Allingham and Lilian’s relationship hints at the conflict that may one day force women to banish men to virtual reality, Arthur and Rose’s egalitarian romance prefigures a “gentle” future of makers and women living together in naked harmony. There are many futures, many perspectives, and many possibilities. When confronted by a shockingly futuristic vision, it’s important that we think of the Clockwork man’s hat . . . and remind ourselves that any such vision may be, at its core, a fundamentally reactionary enterprise.

  A version of this essay was originally published by HiLoBooks.

  1

  The Coming of the Clockwork Man

  I

  It was just as Doctor Allingham had congratulated himself upon the fact that the bowling was broken, and that he had only to hit now and save the trouble of running, just as he was scanning the boundaries with one eye and with the other following Tanner’s short, crooked arm raised high above the white sheet at the back of the opposite wicket, that he noticed the strange figure. Its abrupt appearance, at first sight like a scare-crow dumped suddenly on the horizon, caused him to lessen his grip upon the bat in his hand. His mind wandered for just that fatal moment, and his vision of the on-coming bowler was swept away and its place taken by that arresting figure of a man coming over the path at the top of the hill, a man whose attitude, on closer examination, seemed extraordinarily like another man in the act of bowling.

  That was why its effect was so distracting. It seemed to the Doctor that the figure had popped up there on purpose to imitate the action of a bowler and so baulk him. During the fraction of a second in which the ball reached him, this secondary image had blotted out everything else. But the behaviour of the figure was certainly abnormal. Its movements were violently ataxic. Its arms revolved like the sails of a windmill. Its legs shot out in all directions, enveloped in dust.

  The Doctor’s astonishment was turned into annoyance by the spectacle of his shattered wicket. A vague clatter of applause broke out. The wicket-keeper stooped down to pick up the bails. The fielders relaxed and flopped down on the grass. They seemed to have discovered suddenly that it was a hot afternoon, and that cricket was, after all, a comparatively strenuous game. One of the umpires, a sly, nasty fellow, screwed up his eyes and looked hard at the Doctor as the latter passed him, walking with the slow, meditative gait of the bowled out, and swinging his gloves. There was nothing to do but to glare back, and make the umpire feel a worm. The Doctor wore an eye-glass, and he succeeded admirably. His irritation boiled over and produced a sense of ungovernable, childish rage. Somehow, he had not been able to make any runs this season, and his bowling average was all to pieces. He began to think he ought to give up cricket. He was getting past the age when a man can accept reverses in the spirit of the game, and he was sick and tired of seeing his name every week in the Great Wymering Gazette as having been dismissed for a “mere handful.”

  He despised himself for feeling such intense annoyance. It was extraordinary how, as one grew older, it became less possible to restrain primitive and savage impulses. When things went wrong, you wanted to do something violent and unforgivable, something that you would regret afterwards, but which you would be quite willing to do for the sake of immediate satisfaction. As he approached the pavilion, he wanted to charge into the little group of players gathered around the scoring table—he wanted to rush at them and clump their heads with his bat. His mind was so full of the ridiculous impulse that his body actually jolted forward as though to carry it out, and he stumbled slightly. It was absurd to feel like this, every little incident pricking him to the point of exasperation, everything magnified and translated into a conspiracy against him. Someone was manipulating the metal figure plates on the black index board. He saw a “1” hung up for the last player. Surely he had made more than One! All that swiping and thwacking, all that anxiety and suspense, and nothing to show for it! But, he remembered, he had only scored once, and that had been a lucky scramble. The fielders had been tantalisingly alert. They had always been just exactly where he had thought they were not.

  He passed into the interior of the pavilion. Someone said, “Hard luck, Allingham,” and he kept his eyes to the ground for fear of the malice that might shoot from them. He flung his bat in a corner and sat down to unstrap his pads. Gregg, the captain, came in. He was a cool, fair young man, fresh from Cambridge. He came in grinning, and only stopped when he saw the expression on Allingham’s face.

  “I thought you were pretty well set,” he remarked, casually.

  “So I was,” said Allingham, aiming a pad at the opposite wall. “So I was. Never felt more like it in my life. And then some idiot goes and sticks himself right over the top of the sheet. An escaped lunatic. A chap with a lot of extra arms and legs. You never saw anything like it in your life!”

  “Really,” said Gregg, and grinned again. “H’m,” he remarked, presently, “six wickets down, and all the best men out. We look like going to pieces. Especially as we’re a man short.”

  “Well, I can’t help it,” said Allingham, “you don’t expect a thing like that to happen. What’s the white sheet for? So that you can see the bowler’s arm. But when something gets in the way, just over the sheet—just where you’ve got your eye fixed. It wouldn’t happen once in a million times.”

  “Never mind,” said Gregg, cheerfully, “it’s all in the game.”

  “It isn’t in the game,” Allingham began. But the other had gone out.

  Allingham stood up and slowly rolled down his sleeves and put on his blaz
er. Of course, Gregg was like that, a thorough sportsman, taking the good with the bad. But then he was only twenty-four. You could be like that then, so full of life and high spirits that generosity flowed from you imperceptibly and without effort. At forty you began to shrivel up. Atrophy of the finer feelings. You began to be deliberately and consistently mean and narrow. You took a savage delight in making other people pay for your disappointments.

  He looked out of the window, and there was that confounded figure still jigging about. It had come nearer to the ground. It hovered, with a curious air of not being related to its surroundings that was more than puzzling. It did not seem to know what it was about, but hopped along aimlessly, as though scenting a track, stopped for a moment, blundered forward again and made a zig-zag course towards the ground. The Doctor watched it advancing through the broad meadow that bounded the pitch, threading its way between the little groups of grazing cows, that raised their heads with more than their ordinary, slow persistency, as though startled by some noise. The figure seemed to be aiming for the barrier of hurdles that surrounded the pitch, but whether its desire was for cricket or merely to reach some kind of goal, whether it sought recreation or a mere pause from its restless convulsions, it was difficult to tell. Finally, it fell against the fence and hung there, two hands crooked over the hurdle and its legs drawn together at the knees. It became suddenly very still—so still that it was hard to believe that it had ever moved.

  It was certainly very odd. The Doctor was so struck by something altogether wrong about the figure, something so suggestive of a pathological phenomenon, that he almost forgot his annoyance and remained watching it with an unlighted cigarette between his lips.

  II

  There was another person present at the cricket match to whom the appearance of the strange figure upon the hill seemed an unusual circumstance, only in his case it provided rather an agreeable diversion than an irritating disturbance. It had been something to look at, and much more interesting than cricket. All the afternoon Arthur Withers had been lying in the long grass, chewing bits of it at intervals and hoping against hope that something would happen to prevent his having to go out to the pitch and make a fool of himself. He knew perfectly well that Tanner, the demon bowler of the opposing team, would get him out first ball. He might linger at the seat of operations whilst one or two byes were run; but there were few quests more unwarranted and hopeless than that excursion, duly padded and gloved, to the scene of instant disaster. He dreaded the unnecessary trouble he was bound to give, the waiting while he walked with shaking knees to the wicket; the careful assistance of the umpire in finding centre for him; all the ceremony of cricket rehearsed for his special and quite undeserved benefit. And afterwards he would be put to field where there was a lot of running to do, and only dead balls to pick up. Of course, he wasn’t funking; that wouldn’t be cricket. But he had been very miserable. He sometimes wondered why he paid a subscription in order to take part in a game that cost him such agony of mind to play. But it was the privilege that mattered as much as anything. Just to be allowed to play.

  Arthur was accustomed to be allowed to do things. He accepted his fate with a broad grin and a determination to do whatever was cricket in life. Everybody in Great Wymering knew that he was a bit of a fool, and rather simple. They knew that his career at the bank had been one wild story of mistakes and narrow escapes from dismissal. But even that didn’t really matter. Things happened to him just as much as to other and more efficient individuals, little odd circumstances that made the rest of life curiously unimportant by comparison. Every day, for example, something humorous occurred in life, something that obliterated all the worries, something worth waking up in the middle of the night in order to laugh at it again. That was why the appearance of the odd-looking figure had been so welcome to him. It was distinctly amusing. It made him forget his fears. Like all funny things or happenings, it made you for the moment impersonal.

  He was so interested that presently he got up and wandered along the line of hurdles towards the spot where the strange figure had come to rest. It had not moved at all, and this fact added astonishment to curiosity. It clung desperately to the barrier, as though glad to have got there. Its attitude was awkward in the extreme, hunched up, ill-adjusted, but it made no attempt to achieve comfort. Further along, little groups of spectators were leaning against the barrier in nearly similar positions, smoking pipes, fidgeting and watching the game intently. But the strange figure was not doing anything at all, and if he looked at the players it was with an unnatural degree of intense observation. Arthur walked slowly along, wondering how close he could get to his objective without appearing rude. But, somehow, he did not think this difficulty would arise. There was something singularly forlorn and wretched about this curious individual, a suggestion of inconsequence. Arthur could have sworn that he was homeless and had no purpose or occupation. He was not in the picture of life, but something blobbed on by accident. Other people gave some sharp hint by their manner or deportment that they belonged to some roughly defined class. You could guess something about them. But this extraordinary personage, who had emerged so suddenly from the line of the sky and streaked aimlessly across the landscape, bore not even the vaguest marks of homely origin. He had staggered along the path, not with the recognisable gait of a drunken man, but with a sort of desperate decision, as though convinced in his mind that the path he was treading was really only a thin plank stretched from heaven to earth upon which he had been obliged to balance himself. And now he was hanging upon the hurdle, and it was just as though someone had thrown a great piece of clay there, and with a few deft strokes shaped it into the vague likeness of a man.

  III

  As he drew nearer, Arthur’s impression of an unearthly being was sobered a little by the discovery that the strange figure wore a wig. It was a very red wig, and over the top of it was jammed a brown bowler hat. The face underneath was crimson and flabby. Arthur decided that it was not a very interesting face. Its features seemed to melt into each other in an odd sort of way, so that you knew that you were looking at a face and that was about all. He was about to turn his head politely and pass on, when he was suddenly rooted to the ground by the observation of a most singular circumstance.

  The strange figure was flapping his ears—flapping them violently backwards and forwards, with an almost inconceivable rapidity!

  Arthur felt a sudden clutching sensation in the region of his heart. Of course, he had heard of people being able to move their ears slightly. That was common knowledge. But the ears of this man positively vibrated. They were more like the wings of some strange insect than human ears. It was a ghastly spectacle—unbelievable, yet obvious. Arthur tried to walk away; he looked this way and that, but it was impossible to resist the fascination of those flapping ears. Besides, the strange figure had seen him. He was fixing him with eyes that did not move in their sockets, but stared straight ahead; and Arthur had placed himself in the direct line of their vision. The expression in the eyes was compelling, almost hypnotic.

  “Excuse me,” Arthur ventured, huskily, “did you wish to speak to me?”

  The strange figure stopped flapping his ears and opened his mouth. He opened it unpleasantly wide, as though trying to yawn. Then he shut it with a sharp snap, and without yawning. After that he shifted his whole body very slowly, as though endeavouring to arouse himself from an enormous apathy. And then he appeared to be waiting for something to happen.

  Arthur fidgeted, and looked nervously around him. It was an awkward situation, but, after all, he had brought it on himself. He did not like to move away. Besides, having started the conversation, it was only common politeness to wait until the stranger offered a remark. And presently, the latter opened his mouth again. This time he actually spoke.