The second a thing was no longer possible, he forgot it. It was why he maintained that a book was nothing but a dead story, thank you, and he preferred them while they were still alive, fluttering about in someone’s mind, with lots of possible endings and interesting side bits, before the editor pulled them off and pinned it down on paper and he forgot all the good parts. [loc. 434]
I was immensely pleased when NetGalley provided me with an advance review copy in exchange for this honest review. Twenty-four hours after receiving the notification, I'd finished my first read-through, and I haven't really stopped thinking about it since.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow is a direct sequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. (I am still wondering how the events of The Bedlam Stacks will affect, or have affected, this version of the world. Something should have changed by now ...) In Watchmaker, Pulley introduced Keita Mori, who remembers possible futures, and telegraph clerk -- later, Foreign Office translator -- Thaniel Steepleton, who becomes Mori's friend and lover. These two , together with workhouse orphan Six and physicist Grace Carrow (both also featured in the earlier novel), are the focus of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow: there are new characters too, including the redoubtable Mrs Pepperharrow and bellicose Count Kuroda, Prime Minister of Japan.
For the majority of the novel does take place in Japan, where Grace Carrow is teaching, and Thaniel is engaged by the British Legation to uncover the reason for the Japanese staff's complaints of ghosts, and Mori is returning to the life of wealth and privilege he abandoned. Meanwhile, Russian warships are 'exercising' off Nagasaki, and the new Japanese Navy -- forty ironclads from Liverpool -- is due to arrive any day. Mori is constructing a delicate edifice of coincidence and causality that will change the future, but he won't (or can't) say why.
I found a great deal to love in this novel. Pulley's prose is inventive and evocative: Thaniel's narratives are especially rich in novel metaphor ('the room hammocked around him') and his synaesthesia is almost like an additional sense. I liked Grace much more in this novel, and Mori -- 'the king of useful deaths' -- becomes a grandly tragic figure, a world-shaper with a burden of grief and guilt rather than just someone who might bring about a convenient coincidence. Six, who may be 'on the spectrum', is a remarkably vivid character for a nine-year-old girl, and her sidelong observations are astute and sometimes unsettling. Takiko Pepperharrow, working-class, half-English, actress and theatre-owner, is marvellous: intelligent and fierce, with a dramatic arc that I found enormously affecting. (Her choices are her own, not forced upon her.)
It took me some time to articulate what I liked most about Pulley's Japan: despite the ghosts and the tea ceremonies, it is neither mystical nor exoticised. These are people living ordinary lives, no stranger than Thaniel's fellow Londoners.
I found the glimpses of lost futures especially poignant. Mori stops remembering a future when it becomes impossible: this affects his language, his actions, his thoughts. He is at once in control of possibilities, or fates, and at their mercy. Imagine how a clairvoyant grieves, when someone hasn't yet died ...
Random observation: Pulley doesn't often describe physical appearance, and never in any detail. We get Thaniel's perception of someone as 'short and plain', or Takiko noticing that her husband's bones are more prominent. Nobody looks at anybody, except sometimes at their clothes: and even then it's more to do with quality and style than with physical detail. I still don't know what colour Thaniel's hair is: and it doesn't matter.
I am still wondering about several aspects of the novel. Spoilers in white! Why the dragon? Why just that one? Will anyone in this universe disprove the existence of luminiferous ether, as Einstein did in our timeline? (My guess is no, because here it is literal.) Why did Mori get ill in Paris? And how does he remember radio? And what about Merrick's plantation? And do owls really have chins?
I would also like to add that this is, in part, a wholly satisfactory love story. And, separately, a truly tragic story of unrequited love.
UK publication date may be as soon as 25th February...
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