Just as I reached the critical moment in The Clockwork Girl, as the book's final secret was being revealed, the voice of a young girl, crystal clear but also oddly ethereal, came over the hedge and into the garden. I nearly jumped out my skin, and was suddenly covered in goose bumps. For the shortest of moments I thought the book was talking to me.
And so the best word I have to describe Anna Mazzola's compelling slice of pre-Revolutionary French Gothic is immersive. Mazzola whisks us around 18th Century Paris - from the impoverished and squalid rookeries to the deceptive grandeur of Louvre and finally the splendour (and the stench) of Versailles - and brings alive the sights, the sounds and the smells of the City. This for me is the very essence of historical fiction: I want to be there, in the street or in the room. And Mazzola took me straight to the heart of it.
The story is tantalizing, the truth seemingly always just out of reach, and so the reader feels empathy with the heroine, Madeleine, a young woman born to an exploitative brothel keeper who is sent by the police to spy on one of Paris's most celebrated clockmakers.
Madeleine is made maid to Veronique, the clockmaker's daughter, but is charged with discovering what's really going on in the horologist's workshop, where in addition to clocks, he is experimenting with other mechanical creations, including lifelike animals.
As the clockmaker finds favour with Louis XV, the entire household is thrust into the intrigue and politics of the French court and Madou's investigations place her further in peril. Meanwhile children are disappearing from the streets of Paris, and as the populace finds a fury that in a few decades time will sweep the monarchy away, Madou begins to wonder if that situation is linked to her own investigations.
Mazzola also lifts the veil on life inside the French court and in particular the precarious nature of being the mistress of a capricious tyrant, in this case the real Madame de Pompadour.
In all it makes for a riveting read, rich in detail and atmosphere, packed with fascinating characters and a story that twists and turns to its dramtic climax (even without the intervention in the garden).
I bought this book initially because I saw the author holding an unofficial signing session in a central London Waterstone´s. A happy coincidence. I'll buy the next because I loved the story-telling and the writing.