Chapter Seven: The Chess Machine

At the moment I am quite absorbed in Midnight's Children, a fast and loose and wildly fascinating novel by the much-lauded Salman Rushdie; I won't urge you to read it, as the Booker award committee already has in plenty. But just to repeat, I'm enjoying it quite a bit - Rushdie manages to achieve that delicate quality in a very stream-of-consciousness narrative which manages to bring the reader along instead of rushing past them. His fluid story-telling weaves in and out of itself, braiding one story after another and yet still managing to retain its essential core around Saleem Sinai, the appealingly self-conscious narrator. So far, I love it. And that's all I'll say about it for now.

Today I thought I'd take a dig into the annals of my reading history and tell you about a charming and gothic steampunk novel that a very good friend recommended to me, called The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr.



The Chess Machine is a finely crafted historical fiction piece based around the mysterious Mechanical Turk, an automaton presented in the court of Empress Maria Theresia by the inventor Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen. Lohr uses this historical event as a spring board, weaving a deeply complex and intriguing explanation for the real-life Turk, who defeated every opponent that sat down across from it.

The richness of the historical background comes into play for every aspect of the novel. The political intrigue of the Viennese court, the greed and desire for recognition of the nobels and courtiers, and the influence of pride and arrogance are hypnotic. Lohr skillfully hangs on to the allure of possibility; the scent of steampunk hangs around the pages, giving the streets of Austria and Hungary an appealing weight of gaslights and fog, but he never veers completely into fantasy. Nothing Lohr presents in his tale is impossible; it retains that slight disbelief necessary to make a story seem totally real.

Where Lohr occasionally trips up are pure details of editing. The Chess Machine is the first novel from the German writer, and there are places within the piece that drag slightly due to over-description or sloppy narration. But these moments are few and flighty, and don't detract from the enjoyment of the work. It is surprising that Lohr does not get weighed down by over-meditation on ethical or moral dilemmas, preferring to hint at their import and leaving the reader to contemplate them rather than letting his brass-and-gears fairy tale get bogged down.