I’m a monster of pickiness when it comes to reading, and also very avoidant and stubborn. If my reading-brain were a quadrupedal ungulate she’d kick a lot, often, and run away if she didn’t like the project. This restricts my range as a critic — I can’t tackle deep reading lists without making life very difficult for myself and those around me. A fact which made writing a dissertation awkward. “Just read the required bibliography…please?” was probably a thought that occurred to my long-suffering adviser once or twice.
All of which is to say, I’ve had Natasha Pulley’s Watchmaker of Filigree Street in my TBR pile for literal years, ever since my literal best friend gave it to me as a Christmas present and said “it’s really good.” I never — never — picked it up until now, and only did so because the same person is enjoying Pulley’s latest novel, The Half-Life of Valery K. One of the major facets of our friendship, of course, is talking about books. “Have you read Watchmaker,” she said recently, wanting to draw a parallel or make a distinction. “Uh, no, not yet,” I said, hearing as from a distance the sound of an extremely cursed quadrupedal ungulate kicking a tree for no good reason. Mentally taking up both carrot and goad, I went home, and over the weekend, read the book.
Well! It’s very interesting! And I can now discuss it with one of my favorite people! Watchmaker also closes a bit of a circle on something I’ve been nebulously thinking about for a while. Which is: how writers who drift somewhere between speculative and historical fiction approach the topic of clairvoyance.
Having characters actually-factually see the future is a dividing-point between genres of fiction. I think. I mean — this is messy, and you can be “literary” and still play about with prognostication and prophecy. You might even be called daring and a rule-breaker if you do so. However, let me not descend into a pit of perhaps misdirected anger whose origins I truly do not myself understand. We are going to move on.
I read Pulley’s light-clockworkpunk-historical-fictional universe as if it operates in relation to the historical-fictional universes of two other authors I’m familiar with, and *in very different ways* admire: Dorothy Dunnett and Nicola Griffith. You see the limitations there, right away. There must be other texts that apply. I’m going to deal with the ones I know.
I really, really think Pulley is a hardcore Dunnett fan — with, no doubt, her own reservations and problems in re: Dunnett’s work. It makes sense stylistically and also in terms of plot. Dunnett never liked saying anything clearly, outright: she seems to have believed in something like the pleasures of syntactic difficulty, as well as the pleasures of intricate and treacherous plotting — both in terms of what happens in her novels, and in terms of what happens for and to her readers.
There’s some of both of these things in Pulley. Pulley’s use of simile is fairly Dunnettian, I think, though I’d have to do a systematic study no one is paying me to do, to be more definite. Dunnett was phenomenally good at the slantwise, unexpected comparison which takes you a minute to unpack — her similes are like little gear-driven machines that go ‘ting!’ when your brain finds the right lever. There’s a line somewhere in the Niccolo books that goes (approx.) “both men rose at the same time, as if someone had hefted a bar between their gaze” — that sort of thing. Well. I give you, Natasha Pulley:
“‘Oh,’ the watchmaker said, and leaned forward and caught the balled-up newspaper that would have hit Thaniel’s shoulder. He did it slowly, as if he were taking a money-spider from the air[.]” (59)
As if WHAT? Well, it takes some unpacking. Pulley’s brief simile-machines can be even more difficult of access than Dunnett’s. The shock or difficulty of Dunnett’s image (which I am, as it were, pulling out of a hat without checking anything) lies in its unexpectedness, even its grotesqueness — who ever heard of, or would want to see, two men joined at the eyes by a bar? But we’ve all seen two people rise as if summoned simultaneously, so we can get to where she wants us to be. In a way, the imagined “bar” is a marker of Dunnett’s willingness to use hard instruments to move her readers along. Pulley’s gentler but more challenging simile, her “as if,” forces us perhaps to Google ‘money-spider,’ and to think about how you would pull a UK spider believed to convey good fortune from its midair web. Well, you’d do it carefully, because you don’t want to hurt the spider. The trip through language to comprehension is difficult, but there is a payoff — if you like taking that sort of a journey.
Pulley’s characters, in ways similar but not identical to Dunnett’s, have to struggle with the slipperiness of intricate, oblique language; and the uncanniness of beautiful, perhaps sentient machines; and the dangers of intricate, oblique emotional and geopolitical conspiracies. This is especially true when her characters are trying to figure out how to cope with the weird currents and influences that crowd around the Watchmaker himself, Baron Keita Mori. Mori shares with Dunnett’s hist-fic protagonists, Niccolo and Lymond, the condition of being (or being thought to be) the illegitimate child of nobility, and the condition of being dangerous with a sword and/or architecture, take your pick. He also shares with them a frightening ability — framed by Pulley in terms of an alternative physics that influences the materiality of thought — to discern and in Mori’s case to definitely influence the future outcomes of current events. He’s a clairvoyant with a difference.* By using risky, effortful, dangerous strategies, he can sometimes make events turn out a certain way.
It is interesting to me, very interesting, that having finished The Watchmaker of Filigree Street I still don’t know what the moral valance around Mori is. (His name is, as I think about it belatedly, identical with the Latin for the present infinitive of the verb “to die.”) Some of the book’s obliquities are directed at holding our sense of his predominant goodness or badness in suspense, and I really do like it that Pulley has written a fully ambivalent, powerful, queer character. One has a sense that given his ability to influence probability, he cannot help but be corrupted to some degree. This means he is partly controlled by an involuntary drive to choke off the futures he doesn’t prefer. The only character in the book smart enough to figure this out is also as it turns out Mori’s only rival in love, and Grace Carrow — lady physicist — expresses her sense of the impossibility of her own situation in this way:
A train crashed past as she rounded the next bend [on foot, in the London Underground.] The headlamp was bright in the dark. Though she pressed herself to the opposite wall, the blast of hot air from the engine was searing. Steam flooded everything long after the train had gone. She coughed, tasting soot…stared upward, and tried to think at what point it had become inevitable that she would be here today, running through underground tunnels from a man who nobody in their right mind would have challenged. (Watchmaker, 297)
Grace’s plot-arc is, for me, an advance on Dunnett: I prefer it. A lot of accomplished, interesting women get caught in the cogs of Lymond and Niccolo’s complicated, unforgiving intrigues and are, quite frankly, ground up. Nobody’s ever happy when it happens, but also nobody’s really surprised. That’s something which, over time, came to bother me a lot and retroactively ruined the “one true heterosexual love” scenario with which both series ambivalently conclude. By contrast Carrow fights back honorably and intelligently against Mori’s cozy but ruthless pursuit of Thaniel Steepleton — the man she also is coming to love, or can imagine loving. (The fact that the idea of Thaniel and Carrow in love possesses shared plausibility in Mori’s world is as good as an actual threat, to the Baron.)
Spoiler! — Grace Carrow is defeated. Whether that is good or bad for Thaniel Steepleton, or just different, I don’t actually know. But Pulley indicates that Mori concedes Grace’s quality as an opponent, and also and very importantly he does not, in the end, murder her. This is progress. I’ll take it. Now, back to clairvoyance and genre.
I sort of have to end for the day soon, because somehow, I don’t know how, I sat down to write this when I had time? before the kids came home? and now that time is gone. So let me try to summarize where I’m going. Loosely speaking, writing speculative fiction means you have decided to “real the unreal.” You take something we don’t currently think exists — and that can go pastwise or futurewise or alternative-now-wise — and you say “no, it exists. And here’s what things look like, as a consequence.”
Dunnett’s work, a great deal of which (in the case of the Lymond Chronicles) stealthily reals the unreal via its assertion that clairvoyance and astrology work,** is usually classified as historical fiction though. So I actually think Dunnett is kind of cheating, in genre terms — which, I mean, that’s fine; mix everything up together and call it what you want, fine — but let’s go ahead and call her historical fiction at least spec-fic adjacent, which everyone has been behaving as if it is for decades anyway. Contrariwise, sometimes-science-fiction-writer Nicola Griffith’s 100% stunning no notes Hild establishes its own non-speculative bona fides explicitly by stating that Hild’s otherwise spooky foreknowledge of 7th-century political events is based on an atypical ability to register and analyze patterns of behavior, weather and other observable phenomena. Hild is a gifted leader, not a clairvoyant.
In sum, the question of whether you’re a yes, no, or maybe on the subject of clairvoyance does seem to me to be sort of a shaping — and recognized? — marker of what kind of work you’re undertaking, as a historical fiction author. And all of these writers — Pulley, Dunnett, Griffith — are also wrestling with their own research-driven ‘clairvoyance’ about the outcome of future events in the stretch of history (or alt-history) they’ve decided to limn for their readers. Clairvoyance: y/n/maybe? is fully a question too (that is) about what you think historical-fiction authorship is, or should be.
OK. Got some other things to catch up on. Maybe more on this later!
*The nature of the difference is still obscure to me. It may be that for all practical purposes, Dunnett’s Lymond and Niccolo participate in something very like Mori’s type of effectual clairvoyance. I’m working on it.
**sorry. look, I have remaining questions, but it’s basically incontestable that a lot of people selling these things are not people of good faith. etc.
Strawberries and Bacon 