I read this graphic novel, as I suspect most people did, because it's based on the (excellent) Rush album of the same name. That album tells the story of a young man traveling through the steampunk world of Albion -- inasmuch as a piece of music can be steampunk -- seeking adventure and self-actualization in the face of an oppressive society. The album, being an album, provides a vague overview of the story, not having the time to flesh out any given scene. This lack of detail is fine for a rock album, where the story can exist in the periphery while individual songs focus on general themes and ideas. That it's one of Rush's best albums makes any narrative shortcomings all the more forgivable.
Those same narrative shortcomings plague this graphic novel, however, and they are much more glaring once you've removed Neil Peart's drums, Geddy Lee's bass, and Alex Lifeson's guitar. The story is something of a travelogue, following the generically distinctively named Owen Hardy from his small town to the edge of the known world and beyond. A travelogue, though, perhaps more than any other type of story, really needs time to dig into each stop on the hero's journey -- to meet the characters and see the sights, to experience the local flavor, to tell a contained story within this new setting before moving on. Clockwork Angels, though, barely snaps a few photos before hopping on the tour bus and heading to the next destination. Granted, Kevin J. Anderson is trying to fit this story into a six-issue comic run, which doesn't leave much room for telling this kind of story. But then, someone decided to try to tell this story in that format, and it wasn't me.
The lack of narrative detail is exacerbated by the occasional montage, where a series of disconnected images are paired with narration along the lines of, "I had many great adventures..." We're told that great adventures happened, but we never see them. We're introduced to a number of characters, but we never really get to know them. We're told of great conflicts between the Anarchist, the Wreckers, and the Watchmaker, but we barely learn anything about it. We're teased with hints that there's more to the story than it seems, that there will be some sort of narrative-reshaping denouement, but it never really happens.
In fact, there is precious little world-building in this graphic novel. So much of what makes the story interesting is the structure of this world -- where everything is orchestrated by the Watchmaker, where every step of everyone's life is prescribed, and where order and conformity rule the day -- but we never get much sense of what life is like in Albion. As much as this is supposed to feel like a theocratic dystopia, it never much feels like one. Outside of a brief reference to arranged marriage, life in Albion just kind of seems like life. In the abstract, it seems like an oppressive world, but in practice it seems kind of pleasant. Owen Hardy is one of the few discontent people in all of Albion, it seems.
In theory, this pairing of material and form should be a match made in heaven; a series of adventures set across various steampunk settings is ideally suited to the comic book form. But when confined to six issues, there's no room to do this story justice. Each issue of this series could fill its own six-issue run. On top of this, the half-drawn, half-painted art style doesn't suit the material very well. To some extent this is personal preference, but the resultant images feel soft and vague. A steampunk world, so full of gears and pipes, calls for clean, precise lines. I finished the book yesterday, but I can't recall any of its imagery.
Predictably and understandably, the book quotes fairly liberally from the album, dropping various songs' lyrics into characters' mouths. Beyond this, Anderson sneaks in lyrics from other Rush songs as Easter eggs for diehard fans. These references feel perfectly natural about exactly as often as they feel awkward and clumsy. Oddly, the references to other Rush albums are more often the ones that work, perhaps because they've been given the most care to not seem out of place. As understandable -- or even necessary -- as it is to quote Neil Peart's lyrics in the book, the writing is so overstuffed with these references that it no longer feels like writing. Perhaps an illustrated edition of the albums liner notes would have been a better idea.
As a huge fan of Rush generally and the Clockwork Angels album specifically, I'm glad to have a (marginally) deeper understanding of that album's narrative and world. The graphic novel clarifies or invents last-chapter events that are all but absent from the album, and it completely recontextualizes (or undermines) one of the songs. There is a novel, also by Kevin J. Anderson, on which the comics are based, and surely that delves deeper into this world. If anything, though, this graphic novel has put me off of reading the novel rather than whet my appetite for it. I guess I'll just listen to the Rush album again. Shame.