I read Natasha Pulley’s debut novel while on a family vacation to Yellowstone National Park, and I read her second while on a family vacation to Asheville, North Carolina. Apparently I’m making a real habit of this, since my family started our long-delayed vacation to Boone, North Carolina last month and Pulley released a brand new novel earlier this year.
Speaking of Pulley’s previous books, her first and third novels involve a mysterious power to remember events from the future. Her second novel has a character who is cursed to leave friends and family behind in the past. In her latest novel, The Kingdoms, Pulley has cut out all of the middlemen and gone straight into time-travel.
In 1898 London, Joe Tournier steps off of a train with zero memory of who he is, where he came from, or where he was going to when he boarded the train in the first place. A kindly stranger takes him to a doctor who diagnoses him with “silent epilepsy”, surprisingly common today. His memory might not come back, but everything should be fine and oh look, here’s Joe’s family come to claim him. Nothing to worry about.
It’s just that the view of the city looks strange in every direction, all of the signs are in French, even the name of the city is in French – Londres, not London – and people keep glaring at Joe when he tries to speak in English. He’s apparently an indentured servant – really, a slave – to a kindly French merchant who purchased him from an “unofficial breeder” as a child, he has a wife he can’t recognize, and all of it, all of it feels just wrong.
All he has to cling to is the persistent idea that someone named Madeline is waiting for him, and a 90-year-old postcard from the Eilean Mor Lighthouse, delivered to him with no explanation.
Dearest Joe,
Come home, if you remember.
M
Two years later and Joe is settled into what everyone tells him is his “real” life, with a job in a machine shop and a sixteen-month-old daughter he adores, with a wife he’s accepted if not actually loves. When Joe is finally able to finagle a trip to the Eilean Mor Lighthouse, it’s not long before he finds himself kidnapped by the English Navy. More specifically, he’s kidnapped by a man named Kite and his sister Agatha, two people who need Joe because he’s from ninety-three years into their future and they need his knowledge of technology to stop France from conquering England and creating the present Joe currently lives in.
Confused yet? Well strap in, because things only get more complicated from here.
I love, absolutely love a good time-travel story, but this one is particularly hard to describe because so much of it involves flailing around, being exactly as confused as Joe is, and then getting walloped over the head with the sudden realization of just what the hell is going on. It happens so smoothly that you can almost forget how confused you were. Joe makes for an amazing unreliable narrator since he can’t remember his past, and occasionally forgets what we just saw him doing in the previous chapter, and the mechanics of time travel itself are never fully explained. Not really.
The author keeps the story moving at a fast clip while you’re still trying to figure things out, and she occasionally hints at the very strange things that happen because of people messing with something they don’t understand and can never fully control. The result is surreal situations and unexplained images: a lighthouse that’s sometimes in ruins and sometimes brand new, several pet Galapagos tortoises, a laughing woman in a wedding dress running to keep pace with a winter frost that’s flowing down the beach in a solid line fast enough to freeze the edges of her veil.
And we don’t just get poor amnesiac Joe’s point of view. Kite and Agatha are in the middle of a war with the French, one that is Not Going Well, and we see most of it through their increasingly horrified eyes. This is not a Victorian swashbuckling adventure, this is the brutal, ugly reality of war in the English Navy where a good third of every crew is kidnapped rather than recruited. Ships are destroyed and people are killed fast, sometimes in the space between two sentences. Mutineers are lashed to death or to lifelong trauma, the badly-wounded are often mercifully shot by their doctors, and even the many children who serve aboard the ships have gotten so blase about the constant violence that they’ll try to shake off their own injuries.
One girl observed politely that her arm seemed to be missing and would he mind cauterising the wound so she could get back up to where she was needed while the shock was still a good anaesthetic.
The point of view jumps from the late 1700’s to the late 1800’s and back again, and to many places in between. Kite and Agatha are constantly remembering the lives that led them to this point, plus their attempts to rescue a nobleman taken from another ship – the Kingdom – who is also from a different time. Meanwhile Joe struggles to remember what his doctor says is an imaginary past, and reads a letter from ten years ago, written by a woman dragged there from a future that would now never happen.
And the entire time Joe is in a panic to return to his own time, to a daughter that’s waiting for him there. Or he hopes she will be. The future is moving at the same pace that the past is, so every day is that much longer that his daughter is missing him, and that much more of a chance that something he does in the past will change things enough that she’ll just…vanish, wiped out of existence. Nothing he says can convince Kite to let him go home, because Kite is stoic and implacable and ruthless in a calm way and murderous in a way that sometimes comes out of nowhere, and his cheerful and well-meaning sister Agatha is in her own way even more horrifying than he is.
‘He’s a frightening man, your brother.’
She nodded, full of apology. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I made him that way. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
Everyone is keeping secrets that they’ll kill to protect. The French government is somehow exploiting information from the future in the same way Kite is trying to do, and Pulley has done a lot of research into the Napoleonic Wars to show how altering one battle or introducing one bit of new technology could change the entire course of history. It also shows what a precarious position the characters are in when trying to share some future history, but not all of it; you quickly realize that absolutely everything has some sort of tie to the past that could reveal much more than they’d ever planned to.
And in amongst the shocking images and the murders and betrayals and twisty time-changing nature of all of it, at it’s heart this is…a love story. It’s one that can’t be acknowledged most of the time, one that takes place in long absences and unsaid words. And it’s very, very bittersweet. No one can get everything they want in a time-travel story. Many of the characters acknowledge that some of the things they’re trying to save in their reality aren’t worth saving, and the ones that are might not even be there the next time they look for them. And they all keep trying to get it back anyway, damn the torpedoes (or whatever Victorian-era technology boosted by future engineering it is that can kill a ship in an eyeblink.)
I have a confession to make. I’ve said many times that the time-travel stories where people are aware that the past has been changed don’t actually make sense. If something was removed in the past, then the people in the present wouldn’t even realize it had ever been there before, so you wouldn’t have situations where people blink at a changed city name, or feel heartsick for a deleted loved-one, or even notice that the design of the lightbulbs are changing while walking down the street. But if I’m honest, that kind of effect is one of my favorite aspects of time-travel stories, and Pulley makes it work every damn time.