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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.
( Maker's rhyme, running through the hands of time )
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.
( Maker's rhyme, running through the hands of time )
