regshoe: Orange-and-black illustration in the style of an Ancient Greek terracotta vase, showing head and upper body of a young man with Greek text '𝚨𝚲𝚬𝚵𝚰𝚨𝚺 𝚱𝚨𝚲𝚶𝚺' (Alexias kalos)
[personal profile] regshoe
Cruel admin stuff is preventing me from watching Kidnapped yet and I am pining away by degrees, so I shall distract myself by writing up a rant book review that I started drafting last week, upon how not to do anachronistic historical fiction.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015) is set in London in the 1880s, where our main character Nathaniel 'Thaniel' Steepleton works as a civil service telegraph clerk. One day a mysterious, beautifully-made pocket watch appears in his room in the boarding-house where he lives; and a few months later it saves him from a Fenian terrorist attack by emitting a loud alarm at just the right moment. He meets the watchmaker, a Japanese man named Keita Mori with a mysterious backstory and a remarkable skill with clockwork, and things start to get stranger. Meanwhile in Oxford, a young scientist named Grace Carrow is doing experiments on the luminiferous ether, and it soon becomes clear that both she and the ether are going to become of great relevance to Steepleton and Mori.

Thaniel goes by Thaniel, it's repeatedly explained, because 'his dad was Nat'. No one seems aware that sharing a first name with one of your parents is still fairly common and normal at this period and IME would not be solved that way. Nor is anyone aware that the above-mentioned room in a lodging-house isn't a flat, nor that Saturday morning isn't the weekend; and I thought [personal profile] oursin might have had a few things to say about the very casual divorce at the end. (Perhaps easier since it sounds like it's an annulment for non-consummation rather than a divorce as such? But still, I don't think that's the sort of thing one just does casually at this period). There's a scene in which Mori carefully explains that in Japanese culture first names are not used between casual acquaintances, so he won't call Thaniel by his first name as he apparently expects him to. A very specifically pedantic former borrower of the library copy I read had corrected every instance of 'train station' to 'railway station', which was rather charming. There's very little awareness that class differences exist and are important. Anyway, more frustrating than any specific nitpick was the more diffuse and general inability, and perhaps lack of attempt, to make the characters seem like people who live in a world different from the modern one. In the way they talk, think, frame their ideas, interact with each other, they feel like modern people. I'm glad I read Thomas Hughes's The Scouring of the White Horse recently, because it made an interesting comparison with this book as an authentic contemporary take on the soullessness and inadequacy for a fulfilling life of office work; Thaniel's thoughts along similar lines are those of a modern office worker.

I also felt the book was pretty bad about gender. Grace's character is... I don't like to use the phrase 'Not Like Other Girls', because IMO it's usually an excuse to re-impose gender roles on women who are meaningfully different from most women and have good reason to complain about the consequences, but Grace's attitude to other women is awful in a way that's never examined or developed, and doesn't even really seem that plausible. Given her position I could understand a certain amount of frustration with conventional femininity and forgive her for not expressing it very kindly, but she's at LMH in the 1880s! I don't believe she doesn't know any other women who aren't like that. And there are no other sympathetic women or relationships between women in the book (Grace's only other significant relationship is with an annoying male not-quite-love-interest). More generally her attitudes seem... again, less like someone who's lived her life under the restrictions imposed on Victorian women, and more like someone who's read a rather simplistic story about them, rolled her eyes and gone, 'Well, they were all silly. If anyone tried to impose those restrictions on me I would simply...'

The use of nationalism—Japanese and Irish—was definitely a bit weird. Obviously the whole dynamiting thing is reasonable as something for Thaniel to treat the way he does, but there are, you know, quite a few political complications over the Irish Question in general, which you could engage with at all rather than using Irish nationalist terrorism as a simple plot device and ignoring everything else about it.

And there's a really annoying clockwork octopus. Too-conscious efforts to get the reader to go 'aww, isn't he cute' about your adorable weird pet, agh.

Also Pulley thinks Lincolnshire is in the north.

(That was a funny one, actually, because it led to a misunderstanding on a moderately important point: it's plot-relevant that Thaniel and Mori have the same accent in English, and this is first introduced via Thaniel, who is from Lincolnshire, thinking that Mori's voice sounds northern. Ah, thought I, not the same accent as Thaniel, then, and imagined something Yorkshire or Northumbrian. Only much later do we get Grace's POV pointing out that their accents are mysteriously identical.)

(I'm not quite sure whether the brief reference to a 'South Riding' whose accent Thaniel finds familiar was a nod to Winifred Holtby, an independently-invented small 'this isn't quite the real historical world' flag introduced before the fantasy elements become obvious, or just because Pulley wasn't aware that there never was a South Riding. I hope it's not the last one! I want to be wrong on at least a few points in rants like this.)

And all this was only the more frustrating because there was a lot I really wanted to like about this book! The plot and the central fantasy concept are ingenious. I really liked the idea of using a real-world discredited scientific theory as the basis for fantasy worldbuilding; the plot is worked out as an enjoyably twisty logic puzzle, and those fantastical elements contribute to the relationship development in a really neat way. I haven't said yet that it has canon m/m—well, it's got canon m/m, and very nicely done it is, too! Keita Mori is definitely a character type calculated to appeal to my id (perhaps a little bit too much, in some ways, but never mind), and the ways in which that intersects with the fantasy worldbuilding are... a bit pleasingly creepy, actually, albeit it takes the relationship further away from what I actually find appealing. And [personal profile] sanguinity, you were totally right about the significance of the word 'friend' in a historical novel (or rather, I would agree if anything else about the novel had felt at all meaningfully historical. Sorry.)

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 12:47 pm (UTC)
philomytha: Seaplane attacked by giant squid (Tentacles)
From: [personal profile] philomytha
Huh, I've seen this book recced a number of times but never picked it up, but oddly this review is making me want to read it, possibly because you're giving me a much better idea of what I'm getting myself into! (Also I want to see the depiction of LMH, where I am sure Grace would have found all sorts of unconventional women.) I am resigned to semi-historical fantasy-ish fiction where the characters are largely modern people in period clothes - I found an awful lot of that when I went looking for recent murder mysteries in the Golden Age style too. The fantasy elements and plotting and nicely done canon m/m sound like fun, and thanks to your warning I can be braced for the other stuff.

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 01:46 pm (UTC)
trobadora: (Default)
From: [personal profile] trobadora
Wow, that sounds really frustrating!

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 02:41 pm (UTC)
oursin: image of hedgehogs having sex (bonking hedgehogs)
From: [personal profile] oursin
Heh: I have actually written on a famous annulment case (no, not Ruskin!) and I really don't think it was all that easy to get one - in this case I think a major factor in what was a fairly murky situation was that it was 1916, the husband, a Canadian citizen, was on the other side of the Atlantic in the USA, and did not come back to UK to defend his case. I imagine the decree being sent to him with a white feather pinned to it.

The 1880s was seething with advanced women!

Oh dearie me.

Date: Sep. 21st, 2023 05:04 pm (UTC)
oursin: Photograph of the statue of Justice on top of the Old Bailey, London (Justice)
From: [personal profile] oursin
Hmmmm: I don't think there's been anything like the work done on annulment cases as there has on divorce, and I'm not sure if it was the same as divorce in being an adversarial action, at least in theory, so couples could not openly collude. (In the case of divorce couples did collude, either by not defending, or even by providing spurious evidence of adultery.)

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 04:19 pm (UTC)
isis: (animated girlie)
From: [personal profile] isis
Unfortunately all of Pulley's books that I've read are fairly awful about women. I like them to some degree, but I keep running up against the ARGH factor of the narrative doing poorly by anyone female.

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 07:29 pm (UTC)
muccamukk: Wanda walking away, surrounded by towering black trees, her red cloak bright. (Default)
From: [personal profile] muccamukk
To me it really felt like misogyny hungover from 2000s slash fandom.

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 05:30 pm (UTC)
luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
From: [personal profile] luzula
I read this before getting into British history stuff, so I could enjoy the good aspects of it while not being overly concerned with the unhistorical ones! Alas, my days of enjoying these kinds of historical novels without nitpicking in the back of my brain are past...

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 05:31 pm (UTC)
sanguinity: (geek baby squid)
From: [personal profile] sanguinity
Aw, I'm sorry you didn't like it better! You're right about Grace, and I don't think you'll be any better satisfied with the women in the sequel, should you choose to go there. But to disparage Katsu! Sir, I protest!

a bit pleasingly creepy, actually, albeit it takes the relationship further away from what I actually find appealing

Yeah, I wondered if that would be a problem for you. There's quite a lot of discourse about the series about whether it's possible to meaningfully consent / have agency when it comes to interactions with Keita Mori. The second novel dives much more deeply into that, making it one of its central questions. (I will not attempt to predict whether you would find it a satisfying discussion or not.)

Date: Sep. 21st, 2023 08:32 pm (UTC)
sanguinity: woodcut by M.C. Escher, "Snakes" (Default)
From: [personal profile] sanguinity
Yeah, I think I found Mori most likeable and appealing when he was at his least powerful

I can see that. Fwiw, he spends a lot of the second novel depowered. It's also a pretty hurty novel, in terms of hurt/comfort -- idk if that's relevant to you or not, but it's significant enough to be worth saying, I think.

Hence Phineas Fletcher.

I'm sorry, I don't know/remember who Phineas Fletcher is?

Date: Sep. 22nd, 2023 01:55 pm (UTC)
sanguinity: woodcut by M.C. Escher, "Snakes" (Default)
From: [personal profile] sanguinity
Fair enough! I didn't really think it would tip the balance, given how much you didn't enjoy the first.

Aha, thank you!

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 07:18 pm (UTC)
muccamukk: Dick watches intently while Nix lights a cigarette. (BoB: Ciggie)
From: [personal profile] muccamukk
I thought the octopus was cute! Which I think was the only thing I liked about it. It got hyped when it came out as this great fantasy-historical m/m, which was on thinner ground at the time, but I couldn't handle how much of a pill Grace was about everything, and the Evil Irish Terrorists! plot didn't work for me either. Plus the whole time travel thing felt really handwavy? I know it's hard to stick a time travel plot, but this left me going "...I GUESS?" at the end. And the romance didn't especially work for me either.

tl;dr: I liked this book better before I actually read it.

ETA: My review at the time:
Part of it was that it was pretty awful at female characters, as in there was one, and she spent her whole time disliking other women because she was masculine and therefore smarter than them, and then acting like an idiot about everything. I think it passed Bachdel only because she mocked some suffragettes.

Part of it might be that it felt too constructed for its own good. Because of the nature of the title character, there had to be a lot of careful balancing of moving parts, but honestly the end felt less like a Xanatos Gambit and more like a Xanatos pile up, with the author just flinging plans at the wall for no reason, and then setting the resulting chaos to the music of Arthur Sullivan. Maybe I'm not smart enough to read this book, but I didn't get what was going on, and I didn't care.

Mostly I guess the characters were jerks; I didn't care what happened to them, and the romance was underplayed to the point where instead of making me root for the characters, I just made me more tired of them.
Edited Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 07:24 pm (UTC)

Date: Sep. 20th, 2023 11:50 pm (UTC)
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
From: [personal profile] skygiants
At the time I read this I was ready to give Pulley the benefit of the doubt as far as Grace as to whether she was trying to do or say something interesting wrt this unsympathetically unconventional woman, but I've since read another Pulley and read reviews of several more Pulleys and concluded that unfortunately she really is just not that good about them.

Date: Sep. 21st, 2023 06:28 am (UTC)
garonne: (Default)
From: [personal profile] garonne

I've heard of Natasha Pulley because one of her other books, The Half Life of Valery K, sounded like something I would really enjoy. But when I looked at reviews and saw many people complaining about historical and cultural inaccuracies and a lack of research into life in the Soviet Union, I ended up not even wanting to try it. It's a pity, because her book descriptions always sound great. But I guess not everybody cares about such inaccuracies.

Date: Sep. 21st, 2023 06:59 pm (UTC)
starshipfox: (Default)
From: [personal profile] starshipfox
I was disappointed by this book too, for many of the reasons you bring up. I was surprised by how ardent its fans are: when I posted a review on GoodReads criticising it, I got many angry responses telling me I don't know how to comment on a book. It clearly inspires devotion, albeit it not in all of us.

Date: Sep. 22nd, 2023 03:03 am (UTC)
scintilla10: hug by the snowy light of the street lamps (Stock - joyful hug)
From: [personal profile] scintilla10
I haven't read this one, though I read another by the same author – I found it frustrating for some of the reasons you draw out here. From the comments on your post, it seems like this is a feeling many DW readers share. It doesn't make me inclined to seek out any more of her books!

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