2112’s Megadon to Clockwork’s Albion: A tale of two dystopian cities
Forty years ago this April 1, Rush released its seminal rock album 2112, solidifying its career and a large and loyal fan base that would grow over the years. The album was a lifeline to what would become a long and successful career following the band’s “down the tubes tour” to support its Caress of Steel album.
The explosively angry, dark dystopian vision of Megadon, a futuristic society in which the priests of the Temples of Syrinx have banned music and all individualist artistic expression, moved legions of listeners and maybe terrified many of their parents. As a 13-year-old wearing headphones in my bedroom, the album blew me away and I became a Rushian. That sidelong suite of the title song “2112” was mesmerizing and motivating on so many levels.
In 2012 – 36 years later – Rush released what may be considered a beautiful bookend to their storied career: Clockwork Angels. Another concept album but with the suite of songs taking up the entire album, it’s an epic tale based on a steampunk clockwork universe, run by a Watchmaker whose enemy is the Anarchist and filled with alchemy, pirates, carnivals and a lost city of gold.
Neil Peart’s brilliant conjuring of this world spun off two novels which he co-wrote with Kevin J. Anderson: Clockwork Angels in the same year and its sequel Clockwork Lives, published last year.
To read the two Clockwork novels and listen to the Clockwork Angels album, then reflect back on some of Peart’s earlier epic journeys into dystopia — like “2112,” “Hemispheres” and even the song “Red Barchetta” — is to realize the full maturation of his growth as a writer and thinker. Especially in “2112,” the conflicts are stark and the visions as clear as night and day: In this evil world, the priests are pitted against the innocence of the anonymous narrator who discovers a guitar in a cave. In Clockwork Angels, the good and bad guys are much more nuanced, less black and white. The good guys are not all good and the bad guys not evil incarnate.
“2112” was inspired by Anthem, Ayn Rand’s 1938 novella. But whereas Rand, who authored several fictional tales as well as philosophical works like The Romantic Manifesto, held a simplistic, polemical view of life, Peart even as a young man wrote a tale whose themes were more complex.
As noted by Chris McDonald, writing in his 2009 book Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown:
“In contrast to Anthem, ‘2112’ is not simply an anticommunist or anti-socialist polemic; Peart brings together in his dystopian future three things that have the capacity to massify: religion, technology, and ideology.”
In an earlier work about Rush, the husband-wife team of Robert M. Price and Carol Selby Price also noted the multi-hued world of “2112” in Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of Rush:
“The Red Star has become a trademark symbol for Rush, emblazoning posters and shirts. Why? It is a constant reminder of the danger and challenge of what the Red Star represents in ‘2112.’ It is a gauntlet thrown down against the sapping, vitiating, compromising influence of Big Money, the Mass-Production Zone, the priests of Syrinx. It is a clenching plastic fist raised in defiance, a vow to maintain artistic integrity amid today’s music scene where the most popular products are cranked out by the computers of Syrinx, written without human inspiration in the Music Department of the Ministry of Truth.”
But the Prices point out “2112” was still a work of romanticism. And in their article “Neil Peart vs. Ayn Rand,” Deena Weinstein and Michael A. Weinstein (another couple who are Rush fans to boot — the band may be just the key to marital bliss) also drew attention to the tradition of “romance of social disillusionment” that started in the early nineteenth century and gave rise to dystopias in literature.
The Weinsteins, whose chapter was published in the 2011 book Rush and Philosophy: Heart and Mind United, wrote that their close reading of “2112” revealed it was “a paradigm case of romantic disillusionment.
“At the end of the work, the protagonist first dreams of an ideal city in which their (sic) aspirations are fulfilled (abstract idealism) and, after awakening, plunges into despair. ‘2112’ is a work of romantic pessimism.”
But that was Peart (aka Pratt) in his early 20s. As a 60-year-old, the man also known as the Professor could be forgiven if he, as he wrote in another song, asked himself: “What a fool I used to be.”
The world and all the characters who fill that world are a whole lot more complicated than that. Even, yes, in a clockwork universe.
In Clockwork Angels, both the album and novel, we follow the story of Owen Hardy who comes from the small village in the land of Albion, ruled by the rigidly precise but loving Watchmaker. Owen escapes his village and travels to Crown City with its ethereal Clockwork Angels. It’s a world filled with mystery, adventure and exploration.
Clockwork Lives, a gorgeously designed and illustrated followup, casts the story in a different way and from a new perspective. Here, the protagonist is Marinda Peake whose “quiet, perfect life” in Lugtown is upended when she creates her own story by filling a blank book she inherits from her ailing father, an alchemist and inventor. Billed as a “steampunk Canterbury Tales,” Clockwork Lives unfolds as Peake literally fills the blank book with the stories of many of the main characters from Clockwork Angels and some secondary ones too.
Following its opening epigraph — “Some lives can be summed up in a sentence or two. Other lives are epics” — Clockwork Lives introduces the reader to the strange, steampunk world with its opening paragraph:
“As a blue alchemical glow illuminated the rails, the steamliner came into Lugtown on its weekly run toward Crown City, the heart of the land of Albion. The chain of cargo cars and passenger gondolas was suspended by bright balloon sacks, each marked with the loving Watchmaker’s honeybee symbol.”
Yet unlike the stifling, purpose-less world of Anonymous’s Megadon, residents of Lugtown all the way to Crown City lead more human lives, albeit ordinary and quiet. Their creativity is not crushed, like the guitar that’s smashed into splinters in “2112,” and they are able to live their lives under the watchful eye the Watchmaker.
Consider this observation, just a few pages into the book:
“In keeping with the tenet of the Clockwork Angels that ‘even the ugly can be made useful, possible even beautiful,’ Lugtowners carved the burls into furniture, decorative accent pieces, and fantastic sculptures — particularly carvings of the angels. Every house in town had burl tables, burl chairs, burl countertops, burl bowls, even locks framed with burlwood.”
The description illustrates the chasm between the two dystopias: the visions of a stark, simplistic dark world in “2112” and a more realistic existence of those who live under the rule of the Watchmaker and his Clockwork Angels.
The new mission and challenge in Clockwork Lives is summarized succinctly and memorably by Marinda’s father, Arlen. “What is the distance of dreams?” he asks his daughter as he despairs of having given her too many responsibilities. In his will, Arlen looks to correct that and sets her off on the adventure of a lifetime — or rather many lifetimes:
“Because I made you abandon the life you should have had in order to care for me, I give you the gift of many other lives. I want you to see the things that might have been, the people you should have met, the experiences that could have been part of your own story — and still can be. Therefore, I have arranged for you to have all the journeys of a great adventure — and in doing so, you will live your own life as well. I wish I could have joined you.”
We learn later that his loving message to Marinda in this last gift of his, a blank book, is “that the true gift of life — is living.”
And so we journey with Marinda and her father’s leatherbound book, with an oxblood red cover stamped with clockwork gears and alchemical symbols inset. She uses a long golden needle to extract thimblefuls of blood from the people she encounters along her way, filling those blank pages with their stories: some short and uncommon, others detailed and epic.
We meet them all, in their own words: The Inventor, The Steamliner Pilot, The Astronomer, The Bookseller, The Percussor (yes Rush fans, he knows how to keep a beat, just like Neil), The Strongman, The Fortune Teller, The Sea Captain, The Pickpocket, The Seeker, The Alchemy Miner, The Fisherman and, finally, The Wrecker.
Rush fans will delight in the many references to Peart’s lyrics throughout the book and recognize signposts that made up the band’s career including, of course, “2112.” For instance, Professor Grubin (Rush fans know who Neil’s talking about there) advises his protege The Percussor to: “Think about the average person. What use would they have for rhythms and melodies?”
This weaving into the tale of the entire Rush catologue, as it were, in itself represents the maturation of Peart’s vision as the clockwork universe expands to include all possible worlds and characters whose blemishes and blessings are on a more human scale than that of Anonymous and the Priests. For instance, even as The Percussor acknowledges that the “best part of being human is that we can strive to create something better than ourselves,” we also learn how the path to perfection can destroy a man. The Strongman Levi, for instance, loses his life in attempting a superhuman weightlifting feat.
There is a dignity in these lives — great and small — and Peart and Anderson render them wonderfully. We see it through the eyes of the Fortune Teller whose view of life is from a small, enclosed vantage point. She reflects on that long life and explains its worth which she says is even more greater than quintessence, a life source and the fifth element which is discovered deep inside caves.
“The carnival has been my home for more than a century and a half. Even quintessence fades with time, but my eyes are open, and I see the world though this small booth. But that is all I need to see, for I have seen it all already.”
Marinda concludes her journey, and her book, not in suicide and revolution that explodes at the end of “2112” but in realizing her own dream. It’s a dream that existed outside the perfect, ordinary world of Lugtown, “a place where dreams were no longer a part of her life.” Like the Fisherman Hender whose own dream was of a faraway place called hope, Marinda has chosen to live her own life in “a forward direction.”
For as we learn from The Astronomer, “The worst punishment one can give an obsessive man is to let him complete his task.”
Like Peart, whose own life and journeys were epic, she has come to learn about life in a fuller way, one that matures beyond the sway of ideologies and early powerful influences like Ayn Rand to something truer and grand. As he acknowledged himself in an interview with Rolling Stone:
“On that 2112 album, again, I was in my early twenties. I was a kid. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal — because I’m an idealist. Paul Theroux’s definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also — I’ve just realized this — Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into . . . a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.”
Yes Neil, that’ll do just nicely.
