★★★★★ Remembering the future

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Natasha Pulley

In The Once and Future King T.H. White introduced his version of Merlin. In all versions of Arthurian legend that I know, Merlin is a wizard and can do magic. But White's Merlin was special in another way: he lived backward. He could remember his own future, but the past he could only vaguely foresee, the way that you foresee the future. As a result Merlin could tell Arthur his future, and could tell him how he must act to make that future happen.

Keita Mori, the Watchmaker of Filigree Street, is something altogether more complicated and interesting than White's Merlin, but yet there is a kinship in how they live. To avoid spoiling, I will not be more specific. The story revolves around Mori. (That's 毛利 in his native Japanese, pronounced Mōri, probably derived from 森, Mori, forest, a common Japanese surname.) Besides his strange relationship with time, Mori is a maker of extraordinarily complicated clockwork devices that do flawlessly what Mori intends them to do.

Although he is at the center of the story, it is never told from Mori's point of view. Rather, it is told from the points of view of people who surround him. The most important of these is Nathaniel Steepleton, known as Thaniel, who becomes Mori's friend and benefits from his attention. We also hear from Grace Carrow, who when we first meet her is a physics student at Oxford. The story takes place in the late 19th century, when women were barely tolerated at Oxford. Thus Grace is desperate for a way to continue her physics research. Additional points of view are members of the Ito family, powerful Japanese politicians, who are also in Mori's orbit, although they probably think it is the other way round.

At the end I was left wondering whether Mori sees humans any differently from his numerous clockwork creations.

The ending of the book left me confused. I wasn't sure what had just happened, and there were loose ends that were not tied up, or perhaps merely seemed so in my confusion.

It was an excellent story, with genuinely new ideas that I have not previously encountered. Watchmaker was Pulley's debut novel, and is the only thing I have ever read by her. I will change that in the near future!

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