★★★★★ Erasing borders

The Bedlam Stacks

Natasha Pulley

I think I have figured out what it is that Natasha Pulley does so well in her Watchmaker of Filigree Street books: she erases borders. The most obvious of these is the border between fantasy and reality.

I have loved magic realism since I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, around 1984. (I remember borrowing it from the MIT library, because the librarian asked me, "You don't want to read Cien Años de Soledad?" as if that were totally incomprehensible. I had to explain to him that I couldn't read Spanish. Years later I also remember the Spanish teacher at Berlitz laughing at me when I said I wanted to learn Spanish so I could read Cien Años de Soledad. In fact, I did eventually do it.) It was like nothing I had ever read -- the way the magic seeped into the real lives of the Buendía. La casa de los espíritus was even better.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street books are like that, but more so, somehow. They don't feel like magic realism at all, but I can't explain how they're different. Well, here's a try: they're too real. No one does magic -- the magic is just there. There is no line between the fantastic and realistic elements. This effect is aided by Pulley's meticulous historical research. History of course has no border -- it starts at every now. In Pulley that non-border conflates itself with the non-border of fantasy.

The Bedlam Stacks is kind of a prequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, but only in the sense that twelve-year-old Keita Mori is a minor character in Bedlam Stacks. It is mainly the story of Merrick Tremayne, a botanical smuggler, who travels to the forest of Peru to steal cinchona trees, the source of quinine, the only medicine effective against malaria. There he encounters Indio communities, the remnants of the Inca civilization destroyed by the conquistadores. In particular he becomes the friend of Raphael, a priest in the forest community.

Another boundary that Pulley effectively extinguishes is that between friendship and romance. Romance novels bore me, but I love stories of friendship. Merrick and Raphael were exactly the sort of story I like. Now, if you want to call their relationship a "queerplatonic romance," as some reviewers have done, I'm inclined call that silly, but you're not wrong. You do you! Pulley leaves you free to do that.

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