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Jun. 2nd, 2016 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI first heard about The Watchmaker of Filigree Street from 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.
I mean, there are very much two very different ways to read the book depending on whose interpretation you believe, and either or both may be true -- which I think is actually a very smart way to structure it, given that the book itself relies on Mori's ability to hold two or more possible interpretations of a future in his head at once.
Either you believe Thaniel's reading of Mori, that at heart he's a kind man with little ability to lie or dissemble, that he's as much at the mercy of his own powers as he is in control of them -- or you believe Grace's interpretation, that literally Mori has done is an elaborate deception designed to manipulate Thaniel into believing exactly what Thaniel ends the book believing: that living with Mori is his own choice, that he can live with someone who knows how to manipulate reality towards a desired future and still nonetheless have free will. Whether this is even possible is the question at the heart of the book, and the book, like Grace, is firmly Not Deciding on its answer.
(Though of course most readers -- certainly this reader! -- will want to believe Thaniel, because Thaniel and Mori are adorable, because Thaniel is so clearly much happier with Mori and the world that Mori has given him; and after all, in trying to decide for him that Mori is Not Good for him, Grace is taking away Thaniel's agency as much as Mori ever could do. The Fight For Thaniel's Agency As Waged By A Person Who Is Not Thaniel is clearly a hollow fight and the book knows it. And yet.)
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.
I mean, there are very much two very different ways to read the book depending on whose interpretation you believe, and either or both may be true -- which I think is actually a very smart way to structure it, given that the book itself relies on Mori's ability to hold two or more possible interpretations of a future in his head at once.
Either you believe Thaniel's reading of Mori, that at heart he's a kind man with little ability to lie or dissemble, that he's as much at the mercy of his own powers as he is in control of them -- or you believe Grace's interpretation, that literally Mori has done is an elaborate deception designed to manipulate Thaniel into believing exactly what Thaniel ends the book believing: that living with Mori is his own choice, that he can live with someone who knows how to manipulate reality towards a desired future and still nonetheless have free will. Whether this is even possible is the question at the heart of the book, and the book, like Grace, is firmly Not Deciding on its answer.
(Though of course most readers -- certainly this reader! -- will want to believe Thaniel, because Thaniel and Mori are adorable, because Thaniel is so clearly much happier with Mori and the world that Mori has given him; and after all, in trying to decide for him that Mori is Not Good for him, Grace is taking away Thaniel's agency as much as Mori ever could do. The Fight For Thaniel's Agency As Waged By A Person Who Is Not Thaniel is clearly a hollow fight and the book knows it. And yet.)
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Date: 2016-06-03 03:19 pm (UTC)Is it possible to interpret anything between these two poles, or is the point of the book that the only choice is between (or a simultaneity of) really sweet and really disturbing? It's a really interesting open ending, either way. Is it a standalone novel?
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Date: 2016-06-03 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-03 08:56 pm (UTC)Haha, best two sentence summary! :D
I mean, there are very much two very different ways to read the book depending on whose interpretation you believe, and either or both may be true -- which I think is actually a very smart way to structure it, given that the book itself relies on Mori's ability to hold two or more possible interpretations of a future in his head at once.
Oooh, this is so clever, you're so clever, Natasha Pulley is definitely so clever.
The tension between the two possibilities fell completely flat for me because at the point where the book got really invested in who was right out of Grace and Thaniel, I'd already decided I was going to read Thaniel/Mori as positive, happy and good for both of them and if the text disagreed then I was damned well going to read against the text.
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Date: 2016-06-05 02:57 am (UTC)Natasha Pulley is EXTREMELY clever, there were definitely several points when I stopped the book and went 'OH I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.'
I also mostly was determined to read it this way, but nonetheless I am really impressed by how Thaniel and Grace in their POVs are both SO convinced of their version of events that I did get swayed a little bit when we swapped -- I find it hard to think of other authors who are so good at not showing their own hand when it comes to in-character perceptions. I honestly cannot tell who Natasha Pulley thinks is correct in her heart of hearts, and that's kind of astounding to me.