Snowflake Challenge: Day 7

[lebateleur]

Day 7

In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

This book is wonderful in about all the ways a book can be. First, let's talk about the beauty of Pulley's writing. It's spare, without a word out of place, but so, so richly descriptive. Here's our main character, Thaniel, on page 15 discussing filing mandatory wills with a coworker while they wait to see if Irish separatists make good on a bomb threat against their employer:

'Just sign it and lob it at Mr Croft when he comes past.'

'What are you going to write?'

'Nothing, I haven't got anything anyone would want,' he said, but then realised that it was a lie. He took the watch out of his pocket. It was real gold.

'Thank you for looking after me,' Park said. He was folding and refolding a handkerchief. 'You're awfully good. It's like having my dad here.'

'You're no trouble,' he murmured, before he felt a little sting. He almost said that he wasn't so much older than all the rest of them, then saw that it wouldn't have been fair. It didn't matter how much older. He was older; even if they had all been the same age, he would still have been older.

Just, guh.

Not since Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief have I read a book that gets so much better with each read. I'll never be able to re-experience the initial discovery of reading Watchmaker for the first time but having read it three times now, I realise how ridiculously tightly plotted it is with each new read. I never skim; if I'm reading something I'm reading it damn closely, and it's a rare book where I miss things on the second read, to say nothing of the first.

And Pulley is a joy; she never tells you anything. She just quietly shows (and boy does she know how to show) and trusts her readers are smart enough and careful enough to catch it. Here are some of my favorite examples of this with bonus gushing. If you haven't already, READ THE BOOK FIRST. You won't regret it. Now having properly caveated,

I love how history - Japanese and British - is woven so tightly into Watchmaker's plot, but without any obnoxious appendix or epilogue or author's note to spell it out for readers. I love how the novel can stand on its own even if you don't catch all or any of the historical references.

I love how Pulley shows us that Thaniel is a pianist, always a pianist, and nothing but a pianist; it drives so much of the novel but if you blink, you'll miss it.

The first time I read Watchmaker I thought to myself, Oh, I like how she is setting up Thaniel and Grace and that their's isn't a traditional love story between traditionally male/female characters. But man, slasher me wants to write a Mori/Thaniel fic. The post-wedding night scene honesty caught me out of the blue, and yet, all the signs were there: 'There's no Mrs Mori at home?' 'Come on, I'm not a girl.' The elbow-touching. The quiet evenings and smiling in windows. Mori crying when he sees what not meddling selfishly (as opposed to selflessly) in Thaniel's future has earned him.

And speaking of that. On 233 Grace and Mori have this exchange:

'Please come along and forget it; you of all people know there will be other toys. This work is important.'

'You've stolen my favourite toy,' he repeated slowly, landing hard on toy, 'and now you've invited me down here to play with a new toy whose mind is a reasoning engine running on rails. But I don't like train sets, they're dull, and there is a certain urge to arrange a wreck for the sake of variation.'

To me, this is the pivotal scene of the book. Over and over, multiple characters warn Thaniel he's in danger, asking how he would even know if he's being manipulated, because Mori's prescience makes it possible for him to set things up so that Thaniel doesn't. This passage says definitively that Mori isn't.

It isn't just a neat foreshadowing of the climax (although it's that too), it also answers that question. If Thaniel were clockwork - that is, if he ran as Mori wanted him to - he'd be a toy. Mori's reaction shows how offensive he finds this suggestion. And then he goes on to say that not only does he not consider Thaniel a toy, but that he finds systems dull - i.e., even if he could turn Thaniel into a toy that ran on rails he wouldn't, because he wants variation.

Moreover, because Pulley's already shown us how stultifying he finds predictability during his first meeting with Grace 60 pages earlier it's believable here. A lesser author would explicitly tie the two scenes together, but Pulley just trusts that you've noticed for yourself.

Better still, Grace isn't even a villain here. She's a scientist through-and-through; Pulley's repeatedly shown us that too. Pulling apart seemingly random systems to figure out how to add inputs to get predictable outputs is what scientists do. It's what she would do if she had Mori's abilities, and it's why she can't see how awful they make his life. Neither of them is right or wrong, but they are never going to understand the other's position.

Pulley does not point this out to readers. It's just there and you have to make the connections yourself.

TL;DR: Pulley is talented. Watchmaker is damn good. Read it.

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