It took five years for us to get a sequel to Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, but it was worth it. This book was everything I wanted out of a return to the British translator with synesthesia, and the eccentric Japanese watchmaker who can remember the future.
The plot of Book 1 was an intricate clockwork toy. The plot of Book 2 is an entire room of clockwork toys, all interconnected, each running at different speeds, with no way of knowing which ones are about to run down and which are set to explode. The book is a murder mystery (kind of), with political intrigue, Mad Science, and a glorious tangle of cause and effect, all set in a Victorian-era Japan that’s stuck between a possible Russian invasion and a nationalist movement that’s ready to attack anyone who even looks like a foreigner.
It’s also equal parts ghost story, and love story.
(Spoilers for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which you’ll want to read first if you want to understand anything that’s going on here.)
The main part of the story picks up in fog-drenched London, five years after the events in Book 1. Keita Mori has been called back to Japan to help deal with a Russian fleet off the coast (a fleet that he might have had something to do with), right around the same time that Nathaniel Steepleton’s boss at the Foreign Affairs Office sends him to Tokyo to help deal with the strange messages they’ve been getting over the telegraph.
APPARENTLY THE KITCHEN IS HAUNTED BY SOMEBODY’S DEAD WIFE STOP PLS ADVISE GOD’S ACTUAL SAKE STOP.
Mori brings his delightful clockwork octopus Katsu along with Thaniel and their adopted daughter Six (she won’t answer to Charlotte, so don’t even try) to his ancestral home of Yoruji. Japan is an irresistibly gorgeous setting for a Victorian tale, and the author fills the story with lovely images: a geisha in full costume and makeup chatting on the phone. A tea room inside a glass-walled pagoda on a tiny island in a hot spring. A dinner party in a sprawling Japanese mansion, complete with candles and fireflies and clockwork hummingbirds. All of it is even lovelier (and stranger) in the chapters centered around Thaniel, who’s synethesia lets him see what color different kinds of music are, or what someone’s shoelaces sound like.
Today they were a pleasing shade of kingfisher blue. They sounded like a girl singing a high note.
This would all be a fascinating exploration of a different culture for Thaniel, except it becomes very obvious that there’s something very dangerous going on. The cooks at Thaniel’s office refuse to light fires because “it brings the ghosts”. The Prime Minister – Mori’s old friend Kiyotaka Kuroda – is obviously psychotic. Mori’s old friend Takiko Pepperharrow has a connection with Mori that Thaniel knew absolutely nothing about. Mori is becoming stranger and more vague as he seems to be either losing his memory of the future, or losing his ability to keep track of it, and people keep warning Thaniel that Mori is the very last person he should trust.
‘You seem like a nice person. Nice people don’t do well around Keita, Mr. Steepleton, they end up dead. He is the king of useful deaths.’
I mentioned at the end of my review of Book 1 that I didn’t see how any of the other characters would be comfortable around Mori, knowing that he’s constantly manipulating the future with tiny changes that can have huge effects decades later. It turns out that was exactly the point Pulley was trying to get across. Most of the people who know what Mori can do are terrified of him. What would it be like to have someone in your life who can kill with the careful placement of grass seeds? Imagine having them save you, and then having to wonder if their help was because they cared, or because it was part of a bigger plan.
Mori’s power is almost godlike; the possible murder of Kuroda’s wife is just one of the horrible things in Mori’s past that he either caused, or allowed to happen, and even Thaniel has to…
…well, Thaniel has to do absolutely nothing to try to stop it, because Thaniel is helplessly in love with Mori. Even with the constant worry of either getting imprisoned or sent to an asylum if anyone finds out his real relationship with his “landlord”, Thaniel would do anything for him. And “anything” includes shuffling off to possibly die of tuberculosis somewhere else, because he thinks Mori has a completely different life waiting for him, and he can’t stand seeing the pain in Mori’s eyes when he remembers a future where Thaniel is already dead.
The truth was that he loved Mori so hopelessly he could have found a way to excuse cemeteries of dead wives.
Things don’t improve after Thaniel leaves. In fact what with people disappearing and strange electrical effects shocking everyone randomly and ghosts just generally terrifying the hell out of everyone, things get get out of control pretty damn quickly. And this is the part where a review is really hard to write. The story involves a complicated plot to possibly start a war while neutralizing someone who can see the future, so everything is a mad combination of careful planning and calculated randomness. It’s impossible to do more than hint at what happens, or even what the characters’ goals are, without giving everything away.
The details about Mori’s power are endlessly fascinating; this is someone who can speak a language he remembers learning in the future, but can remember being annoyed with an author for choosing to not write something, even if he can no longer remember the story that didn’t get written. Sometimes this sounds like a superpower; a fistfight with someone who is technically a samurai and can block your moves before you make them is something to behold. Sometimes though, it sounds like being trapped in hell. A person who remembers the future will feel the pain from getting punched (or worse. Much, much worse) even if the attacker was only thinking about hurting them.
A: a) Subject reacted as though I had removed his first two fingers, although I hadn’t yet picked up the chisel. Subject assured me in no uncertain terms that he would make me kill myself before too long.
This book is a lot darker than book 1. The middle section is something of a slow burn, but it’s never boring because Pulley has a habit of catching you by surprise. There are shocking reveals of Mori’s past. Startling jumps in time. A really high body count, and that can be from people getting knocked off in mid chapter or a major character suddenly dying in front of you.
Things are lightened slightly by Pulley’s talent for beautiful images (the different ways to make ghosts appear, the mechanics of using electricity to tell the future, a bowl full of unconnected lightbulbs glowing softly, the constant presence of owls), and complex characters with even more complicated relationships. It’s lovely to see how Mori and Thaniel interact with their adopted daughter Six, responding to her autism in ways that she needs rather than ways that actually make sense (No she can’t ever be returned to the orphanage, because they’d need a receipt for that and Katsu fed hers to the fish in the koi pond.) And Takiko Pepperharrow is an utter bad-ass, whether dealing with a desperate prisoner, a bullying guard, or a psychotic Prime Minister who likes nothing better than an opponent who might actually be stronger than him.
I enjoyed the hell out of this book. This is one of those rare novels that I lingered over to try to make it last. But I find that I’m exactly as unsettled by the whole idea of Mori as I was at the end of Book 1. We spend the entire book knowing that Mori had to have set everything, everything, in motion years before, even if the plot against him made him temporarily forget the future, and how his actions in the past were supposed to change things, and exactly who was supposed to benefit from it. It feels very strange to celebrate the good results from his tampering, but then dismiss all the suffering and death that went along with it with the same “everything happens for a reason” that people have been using to excuse bad things happening since we’ve had all-powerful gods to blame them on.