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The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
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]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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. Andsanguinity, 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.)
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
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
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.)
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The 1880s was seething with advanced women!
Oh dearie me.
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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.)
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tl;dr: I liked this book better before I actually read it.
ETA: My review at the time:
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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.
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I am resigned to semi-historical fantasy-ish fiction where the characters are largely modern people in period clothes
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell spoiled me for that kind of thing, clearly :D
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That's about it...
Huh, that is interesting about the annulment! In this case it's mutually desired by both parties, so I suppose there wouldn't be much defending a case. But it's treated like it'll obviously be trivially easy legally and have no major social repercussions, which, hmm, maybe not.
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Katsu just felt so self-consciously designed to be cute and loveable, and I don't like feeling like I'm being pushed towards a response like that. I will decide how I feel about the characters and their clockwork octopuses, thank you!
Yeah, I think I found Mori most likeable and appealing when he was at his least powerful (I really liked the thing where he foresees all this happy future with Thaniel, and then, oh no! Thaniel meets Grace because of the roulette wheel, a random event that Mori couldn't predict D: ), and in general... I think, if you're going to lean that hard on those feelings from those kinds of characters, then I like them and the story better (for a given value of 'better') when they're not powerful and they don't get what they want. Hence Phineas Fletcher. But that's cool that the sequel has more to say about the ethical issues of Mori's powers—I will probably not read it, but it's good to know.
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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?
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I'm sorry, I don't know/remember who Phineas Fletcher is?
From John Halifax, Gentleman, my favourite champion hopeless piner. :)
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Aha, thank you!