By David Alexander
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Review & Description
Machine Breakers is a difficult book, written in a unique postmodern language which is utterly unforgettable once its readers have made the initial effort of letting themselves be carried away by the tone and the narrative. For this book is only difficult if one thinks the language gets in the way of the story: Machine Breakers is a piece of historical reportage, but with words.
The plot is mythic: retelling the Luddite riots in the words of a curious literary hybrid who could be -- but isn't -- Edgar A. Poe or his protégé Nathaniel Wood, under the influence of Gautier, Baudelaire, De Quincey and Defoe, as well as some of these writers' favorite muse-enhancing substances. The novel is about politics, life, death, commitment and failure. Its humorous pages are many, but laced always with a demotic, polyglot prose that is at the same time warm, scratchy and mesmerizing.
Machine Breakers is an alternative history novel too; in this world the writer is not the writer, the protagonist, called Rages Crusoe, is not a mere actor of the plot he may even have authored, for all we know. David Alexander's fantasy-land is not making any particular point about how things could have been: the present story is really about the right to make things up, to imagine one's way through a world created by strange, teeming untruths. The reader even has to make up the time of the story.
This is a book to open at any page and to wallow in. Alexander (or Poe, or Crusoe) bursts into eloquence at so many points, apparently from an authorial standpoint rather than from a character-narrator's. Crusoe, for an uneducated Luddite is oddly in love with words, which means that Machine Breakers is not a book for whoever is irritated by linguistic exuberance and demands their stories fast and their sentences short. It is rather a serious, delirious attempt to find means of surviving an industrial revolution. The science contained in the book might one day prove useful.
-- Jean-Luc Breton, World Literature Today Read more
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