I happened to pick up Mainspring at the library, because I've heard good things about it, and about Jay Lake, and I was looking for something easy and fun. And it was, largely, easy, and the beginning was fun. It's a great concept, and the opening few locations work marvelously well to let us into the wider world. We meet half-a-dozen interesting characters, both good'uns and bad'uns, and discover hints of an exciting conspiracy.
Sadly, those interesting characters all drop out of the book very quickly. As do the settings. We are treated, instead to a picaresque adventure where our Hero, growing ever more powerful and transparent as he is lifted from setting to setting, leaves more and more of reader-pleasure behind him on a quest of increasing Perilousnessosicitiage, until, at the end, um, well, something happens. I'm not sure what. It's all very metaphysical at that point.
I understand the idea that the first villain you meet in a book can be exposed as a minor irritant as the plot opens up to bigger, broader implications. He is replaced, then, by a bigger, more vibrant, more powerful, more memorable villain, who in turn is replaced by the bigger, begger villain behind him, and then at the end, ideally, the first villain comes back into the book as a minor character should, either redeemed or not, to point out the tremendous distance Our Hero has travelled. That's fine, I can enjoy that. It's a problem, though, for YHB, when the villains are replaced by impersonal Forces, or by the uninteresting servants of those Forces (each level less interesting as more metaphysical).
I am not, mind you, knocking Mr. Lake's interest in the metaphysical questions. I am complaining about his failure to frame those questions within a compelling narrative. More accurately, since the first chunk (or two chunks, really) of the book are so wonderful, I'm complaining about his failure to sustain the compelling narrative framework. The questions themselves—religious questions in a mechanistic universe: would our belief in the Unseen falter if we could see it? Does a Clock really require a Clockmaker? Is a sufficiently wonderful clock any less a reason to believe in a Divine Creator than a sufficiently wonderful sunset, even if we can see the gears and springs?—are good ones, and questions appropriate to speculative fiction, and ones I was, at one point in the book, wanting to see the various characters speculate about. Sadly, they did not so speculate, mostly because they dropped out of the book entirely, leaving a hole that the book's creator failed to fill.
Having started the book looking for easy and fun, I would have been delighted to have been propelled into difficult and provocative. I wasn't. I was in between, falling between two proverbials, and not falling into the delightful mud of narrative, either, but onto the cold hard tile of ... um, of ... the cold hard tile of ... you know, this writing lark is harder than it looks.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.