Surprise-surprise, Zachary Cloudesley is the star of the novel. His mother dying in childbirth, Zachary's early days are with his loving father Abel, a clockwork inventor, as well as a strong-minded wet nurse, Fiona. As a boy, his rich, eccentric Aunt Frances also steps in to the picture, demanding that part of Zachary's upbringing be her responsibility. Through this variety of people, Zachary comes to his teenage years—something which happens faster than normal given Zachary's unusual talents. Able to see visions of past or future after touching a person, Zach develops a keen, sensitive intelligence to the people around him, and the purity of the love they have for him. When his father is taken, Zachary is forced to put his nascent adulthood into practice to find him.
The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley is a novel strongly in the mold of Charles Dickens. The focus is primarily people, family, and friends. Their personalities, their relationships, and their circumstances form the majority of the story's substance. And Lusk's style seems particularly suited. The diction is precise and colorful, giving readers a clear view to proceedings. Yet the pace of such a character-centric novel is not too slow. Viewpoint shifts and moves effectively. There are a couple missed opportunities, for example, building proper mystery around Zachary's father's fate, as well as some telegraphed scenes, for example anything between Zachary in England and Zachary in Turkey. But overall Lusk shows himself in control of the overarching narrative, and maintains reader interest on the journey through relationships and characterization.
The full title of the novel is: The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley: The Spellbinding Historical Fiction Mystery of One Young Man’s Quest for the Truth. I think I would have gone without the subtitle. By using the word “truth”, something profound would seem to be in the works, with the profundity in turn requiring the serious treatment of whatever that truth may be. I'm not certain Lusk treats the novel with that degree of seriousness. The “seriousness” is more relative to the light-hearted combining of the words “spellbinding historical fiction mystery”. That better captures the novel's mood—for it does become an adventure. From a familiar 18th century London to the alterity of Constantinople, Zachary must do some growing up in the face of adversity. But this bildungsroman motif is light, not saturated in the gravity which Truth hints at.
For readers who don't care about a novel's involvement in contemporary socio-politics, thie following paragraph will mean nothing to you. For those who do, in we go. The novel's zeitgeist politics detract from the story. Any writer these days who headlines CHARACTERS WHICH DO NOT CONFORM TO DEMOGRAPHIC NORMS is either trying to capture that portion of the market who care about such things, or is genuinely interested in cultural-social progression. Given the reader will never know to which side the book falls, the question becomes moot. This in turn leads to the fact that superfluous details on gender and sexual orientation become distracting rather than focusing elements. This novel, published ten years ago, would not have gone so far out of its way to make sure the reader knows that Tom is a girl who thinks she is a boy, for example. This fact has nothing to do with the Spellbinding Historical Fiction Mystery, and thus makes it tempting to throw this aspect of the novel on the bandwagon. But I digress.
If you enjoy Dickens, put The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley on your radar. It is a novel strongly in that vein, with a small twist of the fantastic. Given certain devices, props, and settings, steampunk is a broad motif. But characters are the focus throughout, and it's in their tales that the reader will find most interest and meaning in the novel—or not. The novel's politics are often spurious, but that will be up to the individual reader to appreciate, ignore, or dislike.
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