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Jun. 2nd, 2016 11:06 pmI first heard about The Watchmaker of Filigree Street from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
happydork; it's a fantasy novel that, depending on how you look at it, is either a quiet, cozy queer romance or a deeply unsettling work about agency and free will, or lack thereof. Or perhaps both!
In London of 1883, Thaniel Steepleton -- a quiet young telegraph assistant at the Home Office who's given up his piano-playing in order to work a dull job, live a drab life, and send money back to his widowed sister -- almost gets blown up in a terrorist attack on Scotland Yard. The only reason he doesn't is because of a watch that someone left in his rooms a few months ago which starts yelling at him as soon the bomb's about to go off.
The watch, it turns out, is made by a Japanese artificer named Keito Mori with a spare room to let, whom Thaniel immediately assesses as gentle, kind, and lonely. (And 'fragile.' The book does contain an awful lot of descriptions of Japanese people as physically delicate.) The Home Office, on the other hand, immediately assesses Mori as a potential candidate for the maker of the bomb that's just blown up Scotland Yard, and suggests that Thaniel cultivate his acquaintance.
Thaniel, unfortunately, does not make a very good spy. But he is a great roommate! Increasingly willing to accommodate all Mori's strangeness -- and secrets, which Mori does have, OH BOY DOES HE EVER, though not quite the ones that the Home Office thinks -- in exchange for the ways in which Thaniel's life has expanded and brightened since moving into the house on Filigree Street. Very tolerant of the pet clockwork octopus that keeps stealing his socks.
The book's third major figure is Grace Carrow, who is attempting to prove the existence of luminiferous aether despite the difficulty of sciencing while female and Victorian. Eventually, though a complex chain of events, she becomes something like Mori's nemesis. A worthy nemesis, probably, in terms of intelligence and ruthlessness, but I am very conflicted on a.) Grace and b.) Natasha Pulley's writing on Grace -- for one thing, it's clear from very early on that Grace is the clearly sort of person who thinks of herself as Not Like Other Girls. I'm not entirely sure whether we're meant to sympathize with this, and I wish I did know. And I wish there were more women, so I didn't feel so conflicted about not particularly liking Grace.
I'm also a bit -- well, not exactly conflicted on Pulley's writing of the Japanese characters (aside from that 'fragile' thing I flagged above), it's very well-researched as far as I can tell, and there are a wide range of Japanese characters with different opinions and attitudes. And she has cleverly come up with very good in-universe reasons for the two most important Japanese characters to sound exactly like all the British characters! But I will note that in the scenes where Japanese POV characters are talking to each other in Japanese they still do sound exactly like they stepped out of a Sayers novel, which did jar me a bit.
But, all that said, the book is lovely and very clever and I enjoyed it very much. I like the quietness of it, and the fact that the stakes really are not world- or even city-shaking - it's really just a question of whether three specific people are going to be happy or not, and that is a story worth telling.
( More thoughts are spoilery )
happydork; it's a fantasy novel that, depending on how you look at it, is either a quiet, cozy queer romance or a deeply unsettling work about agency and free will, or lack thereof. Or perhaps both! In London of 1883, Thaniel Steepleton -- a quiet young telegraph assistant at the Home Office who's given up his piano-playing in order to work a dull job, live a drab life, and send money back to his widowed sister -- almost gets blown up in a terrorist attack on Scotland Yard. The only reason he doesn't is because of a watch that someone left in his rooms a few months ago which starts yelling at him as soon the bomb's about to go off.
The watch, it turns out, is made by a Japanese artificer named Keito Mori with a spare room to let, whom Thaniel immediately assesses as gentle, kind, and lonely. (And 'fragile.' The book does contain an awful lot of descriptions of Japanese people as physically delicate.) The Home Office, on the other hand, immediately assesses Mori as a potential candidate for the maker of the bomb that's just blown up Scotland Yard, and suggests that Thaniel cultivate his acquaintance.
Thaniel, unfortunately, does not make a very good spy. But he is a great roommate! Increasingly willing to accommodate all Mori's strangeness -- and secrets, which Mori does have, OH BOY DOES HE EVER, though not quite the ones that the Home Office thinks -- in exchange for the ways in which Thaniel's life has expanded and brightened since moving into the house on Filigree Street. Very tolerant of the pet clockwork octopus that keeps stealing his socks.
The book's third major figure is Grace Carrow, who is attempting to prove the existence of luminiferous aether despite the difficulty of sciencing while female and Victorian. Eventually, though a complex chain of events, she becomes something like Mori's nemesis. A worthy nemesis, probably, in terms of intelligence and ruthlessness, but I am very conflicted on a.) Grace and b.) Natasha Pulley's writing on Grace -- for one thing, it's clear from very early on that Grace is the clearly sort of person who thinks of herself as Not Like Other Girls. I'm not entirely sure whether we're meant to sympathize with this, and I wish I did know. And I wish there were more women, so I didn't feel so conflicted about not particularly liking Grace.
I'm also a bit -- well, not exactly conflicted on Pulley's writing of the Japanese characters (aside from that 'fragile' thing I flagged above), it's very well-researched as far as I can tell, and there are a wide range of Japanese characters with different opinions and attitudes. And she has cleverly come up with very good in-universe reasons for the two most important Japanese characters to sound exactly like all the British characters! But I will note that in the scenes where Japanese POV characters are talking to each other in Japanese they still do sound exactly like they stepped out of a Sayers novel, which did jar me a bit.
But, all that said, the book is lovely and very clever and I enjoyed it very much. I like the quietness of it, and the fact that the stakes really are not world- or even city-shaking - it's really just a question of whether three specific people are going to be happy or not, and that is a story worth telling.
( More thoughts are spoilery )
