Machine Breakers

Illustration: digitally enhanced detail from the mural at the Great Hall, Greenwich Observatory, England. Photo credit: David Alexander. Copyright (C) 1998 David Alexander.

Or the True Story of the Notorious Luddite

Rages Crusoe, As Told in His Own Words

ISBN 1-58345-580-9

 

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 protége Nathaniel Wood, under the influence of Gautier, Baudelaire, 
De Quincey and Defoe, as well as some of these writers' favourite 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

A remarkable novel, drawing on the rich legacy of fantasy literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth
centuries to tell the incredible saga of Rages Crusoe... Part Gulliver's Travels, part Robinson Crusoe, part Brave 
New World, wholly unique in his nightmarish vision of a possible alternate history, David Alexander establishes 
himself as a powerful new voice in the realm of literary fiction.

				-- Sorcha MacMurrough, Author