Reading roundup: Victorian edition
24. Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street -- I first heard about the book through ikel89, and then other people on my flist posted about it, as people will around K, and since I seem to be on a slightly-paranormal Victorian kick at the moment, this seemed like a good time to pick it up. My first impression of the book was gentle and melancholy, and this continues throughout, actually -- there is humor and charm and lovely descriptions and moments of quiet poignancy, very small moments of great import, but it's suffused with gentleness and melancholy throughout. It's a very evocative book, even through prose that's quite simple, especially by Victorian standards. It's also a book that is best read unspoiled, I think, so most of the write-up will be spoiler-marked and (if you're not pathological, like me) you probably want to avoid the spoilers. Above spoiler-cut I will only say that I liked all the characters; there's a core of humanity to all of them except the very tertiary ones, and it makes it very easy to empathize with all of them, and to want to give them all a hug, even when they want incompatible things.
There is a resolution in the book that I am still unsure about (those who have read it know exactly what I mean, I'm sure, because everyone seems to have the same set of reservations, however they manage to come to terms with it). There's no way to talk about that unspoilerly, and it doesn't (I think) weaken the book. But it's there, and I'm actually glad that I was forewarned about it, so, passing on a vague warning of my own.
So, with SPOILERS! Enter at your own risk:
My favorite thing about the book (hands up anyone who's surprised!) was Katsu the clockwork octopus. Although it turns out that being a clockwork octupus is not sufficient to dodge the curse where my favorite character pretty much always tends to die. :(
I liked all the human characters, too, though I do think it's interesting that everyone comes across as sympathetic at first, but actually all of the three main characters have some interesting traits that are really sort of eyebrow-raise-y. Grace is the obvious one, of course, and I'll get to her later, and Mori is an interesting case, but even on-the-surface-saintly Thaniel who is martyring himself for the sake of supporting his widowed sister, is willing to marry Grace so she can have her laboratory, is kind to junior clerks, feels bad about bleeding on a borrowed shirt, and feels like having been through the Yard bombing and speaking Japanese he's well qualified for disarming Ito's would-be assassin -- Thaniel, too, has some interesting facets: he is really very facile with lying, including to people he is close enough to that he should probably not be lying to them. One can definitely understand why he'd get in the habit -- he is essentially forced to live a lie, given his sexuality, but he seems to have fewer qualms about it than I would expect.
I *like* Mori, with his quietly resigned loneliness and his quiet humour and his hidden presents of arranged opportunity and his grumpy quirks and his clockwork octopus, but I admit I'm leery of the notion that one person gets to have that power and is not shy about using it, and also how he chooses to use it. He saves Thaniel's life with the present of the watch (and draws him to the shop on Filigree Street), but, as he and Thaniel talk at the end, he does not actually defuse the bomb or cause it to be discovered. Yes, OK, if he'd come to Scotland Yard with an accusation of Spindle, it probably wouldn't have gone over well, but come on, this is a man who thwarted an assassin by planting weeds for six months -- Williamson doesn't know this, but Mori had plenty of other means available to him than just pointing a finger. I can't fault him for essentially killing the first three assassins after Ito (especially if he tried to warn them away first, as he seems to have done with #4 and #5 at least) -- I mean, a bodyguard shooting a would-be assassin would certainly be justified, right? -- but the thing with his cousin and the wall is less clearcut. We see that Takahiro was very cruel to him, even in the presence of others, and probably worse without visitors around, but, worst-case, Mori arranged it so that the wall would collapse and bury Takahiro, and best case, he simply didn't warn him. So that's... interesting. And then there's the unsettling comment about Ito's wife being allergic to bees, which Mori has been keeping not-as-pets. And it's not actually anything Mori *does* -- maybe even something he knows he will never actually need to do, because in all possible futures Ito's reaction is to let him go just based on the threat -- and Ito wanted to keep Mori locked up after he found out, so it's not exactly unprompted. But that's a lot of power, and a lot of precedent, and I can't blame Grace for being worried.
OK then, Grace. I liked Grace a lot from her introduction -- lady scientist at Oxford, my sort of thing entirely. She is in a difficult and stupidly artificial predicament, and easy o sympathize with. I even entirely believe her capable of the things she ultimately does -- trying to frame Mori to get Thaniel away from him, setting what she thinks will be a relatively harmless explosive, using Katsu to carry the bomb, the admission that if she'd known that an accusation of sodomy would've put Mori in jail then she would've gone with that, even the way she treats Alice the maid when she wants to be sure her experiment with the extra ace is "clean". Because I do think Grace is -- OK, this will be totally useless for anyone except egelantier, I expect, but anyway -- Grace is an Athyra, I think: somebody who prioritizes her work, and the advancement of knowledge, above people, and someone who would, quite likely, go efficiently about solving a problem like how to thwart someone who can see the future except for random events without stopping to consider anything like moral implications or possible collateral damage. That part was actually really neat! And she's got the Athyra coldness; it's clear she and her parents don't get along, but her reaction to her mother's death (apparently unfaked reaction) seems remarkably blase for that. It's not that she's without empathy -- I actually liked that she has a moment of empathy for Yuki, "an unhappy child with an idiot for a father. She could remember being that.", regrets the possibility that he may be blamed for the explosion because of his Clan na Gael connections, and wants to protect him from that by keeping him with her so he cannot be blamed for it. She doesn't mean to actually physically harm Mori, checks that he's breathing and drags him to safety in the tunnel. And she is sorry to destroy Katsu, but for an Athyra sort of reason: "She felt wretched. It was a beautiful peice of machinery. Nobody would see anything like it again for a hundred years if Mori decided not to make another." But it's very narrow empathy, and I do think she has that Athyra tendency to treat people like things (which is, ironically, what she accuses Mori of doing with Thaniel).
Anyway, so I could see Grace doing all the things she did, if she had to / felt she had to, but I don't really buy her motivation to do so, right when she does. And I'm not entirely sure how much of this is bug vs feature, but it didn't quite hold together for me, so I don't think it's all feature, at least. Is Grace genuinely worried about Thaniel, what she tells him after, that she's concerned Mori is turning him into a "clockwork puppet"? It could be a legitimate worry, but I didn't get that from Grace's POV, just from her words to Thaniel later. So does that mean that's just an excuse? Is she driven just by fear of Mori (Matsumoto has been telling her about him killing his cousin, after all), or jealousy, since she takes action right after she discovers Thaniel and Mori together? But her actions feel too rational for a 'crime of passion' motivated by jealousy or fear. I mean, Grace is an imminently rational person, but even taking that into account it feels too... cool. It would make sense for her to be motivated by fear of losing Thaniel to Mori (since it is quite clear that Mori disapproves of her), and with him losing the house and lab, but if that's the case, it seems like it would make more sense to, well, do something less drastic and more sensible than what she does, because if she is motivated by rational, long-term considerations, it would make sense to take the time to come up with a long-term plan. Except, of course, that Grace feels that she can't actually plan, because if she makes a decision, Mori will know it and be able to move against her. Which is an interesting aspect of this whole thing -- and I actually really liked how that part was done, both from the perspective of Grace planning or not-planning -- holding the individual steps in her mind like two numbers she's carrying to an abacus, taking each individual step in turn, making decisions by coin-toss so that Mori can't predict them (and the 10 minutes headstart she inadvertently gives him at Victoria station by tossing the coin for the next stop just as the train pulls away instead of just as it arrives) -- but because she isn't really planning or thinking about it, it's hard to follow why she IS doing the things she's doing, enough to find her actions believable. Or at least it was for me. But maybe that's the intent, this weird mix of rational and emotion-driven and piecemeal... But still, it's hard to get one's hands/mind around...
I think this is maybe kind of a case of wanting to have one's cake and eat it, too -- a sympathetic antagonist -- although it would not have felt right to have any other kind in this book. Or simply trying to do something that's very difficult to accomplish in writing because it relies on thought processes that are far less linear than 'normal' stream-of-consciousness stuff, let alone a well-organized narrative. I think getting Grace's point of view on what happened in retrospective doesn't help -- it's great for tension and suspense, because it does look like something might have happened to her at first, though Thaniel doesn't actually suspect Mori, and it allows for suspense about what had happened to Mori, too, with his forgetting English words and having fallen on the tracks. But I think maybe it makes it harder to understand Grace's motivations and train of thought, looking back on it rather than living it with her in the moment.
(Quite interesting, too, is that when Grace first becomes convinced Mori's gift is real, she has the following conversation with Alice the maid:
Alice: It can't be safe to upset a man who knows the future. What's to stop him making sure that you stray into a carriage crash or under a falling pile of bricks. [which is an especially interesting choice of words given how Takahiro died, not that Alice knows about that.]
Grace: Human decency, same as everyone else. [though she looks troubled, and it's clear this is when she starts thinking of the danger]
I'm still puzzled by the pear trees incident, too; even rereading, that feels like such a weird note to me, and I'm not sure I'm getting out of it what I'm supposed to. Is Grace jealous of Mori's gift with the ether here? There's a great line in her thoughts: "In those stories there was always someone who was too unmagic to hear the trees speaking or see the elves in the branches, or who the woods quietly closed out of their own accord. She had never thought it would be her." Is she reacting to his threat/what she perceives as his threat? (But if so, doing something to antagonize him seems ill-advised. Unless she's trying to prove she's not afraid of him... She tells Nathaniel not to shout at Mori for talking to her like that because she doesn't want him angrier, so... It just seems very strange.) Thoughts from others?
While we're speaking of Grace, the thing with Grace and Matsumoto at the end is kind of out of the blue -- not the affection between them, which feels real behind the jokey insults and teasing, and not even Matsumoto's interest in her -- he does seem regretful and sulky around her wedding, which could be jealousy easily, and even before Thaniel he jumps to her defense in front of his friends with uncharacteristic fierceness. (Matsumoto attempting to deliver to Grace a lecture on the birds and the bees was hilarious, btw.) But the sudden intimacy, "Call me Akira" -- it forms a nice mirroring with Thaniel calling Mori "Keita" for the first time, after the early explanation by Mori of what first-name-basis means in Japan ("In Japan, first names are only for who you're married to, or if you're being rude."), and feels like too much too soon, and there just for the symmetry.
Because (above disclaimer about it being read unspoiled nonwithstanding, which was mentioned in all the spoilery reviews on my flist) I'm incapable of reading books unspoiled -- yes, I click on all your painstaking spoiler-cuts, sorry! :P -- but had read the spoilers a long time ago, I wasn't sure, as I was reading, whether I remembered correctly that the book was canonincal Thaniel/Mori or if it was something I had only imagined/had been thinking about a different book. In retrospect, it occurs to me that this is actually a PERFECT way to read this book, since it dovetails so uncannily with Mori's own perception/memories of futures where it does and doesn't happen.
I liked the dynamic between Thaniel and Mori a lot, but not in a way where them becoming an actual couple at the end changed things appreciably for me beyond them living together. The domesticity early on was every bit as cozy and sweet: Thaniel getting used to drinking green tea so that brown tea starts feeling weird, getting used to the warmth at which Mori always keeps his rooms, arguing good-naturedly about Katsu and ... and all kinds of things, Mori rescuing Thaniel's watercolors of music from the wastebasket and hanging it up next to the Van Gogh (wise investment possibilities there! and it just occurs to me that knowing the future is probably part of the source of Mori's riches, hmm... it would definitely help invest one's existing fortune wisely so it multiplies), the present of the opportunity to play piano for Sullivan, the present of weather (which is nicely set up by Thaniel breaking an earlier vial), and the music box for a child that does not yet exist.
I do like the way their relationship makes the change -- that it's Thaniel not-asking a question but deciding to ask, and Mori seeing that decision -- it is such a quiet and intimate act, and unique to this book, that it worked really, really well. But it feels like it almost doesn't matter. I mean, they are both lonely, of course, and having additional happiness through an actual relationship is not something I begrudge them at all. But it seems almost superfluous to the relationship that already exists, maybe thanks to the weird time tricks again... It's not something that bothers me, and there were a couple of lines that I did find poignant, mostly from the age-difference angle (which is something I can empathize with), when Thaniel tells Mori he wishes he'd come five years earlier and Mori replies "You weren't my Thaniel yet. [...] You wouldn't have liked me." and when Thaniel has a (non-paranormal) flash forward seeing himself bereaved later in life because Mori is quite a bit older than him.
I also like Mori's relationship with Six, though Thaniel essentially deciding to adopt her on the spot feels a little sudden. In general, though, the last 25% of the book, in which pretty much EVERYTHING happens, feel quite rushed, compared to the slow build-up for the first two parts. I think I would have preferred the pacing to be more even, to see Grace actually believably reach the point where she felt she had to do what she did, to see Thaniel and Mori negotiating this new normal and the loss it means to both of them (but especially to Mori, since it's a loss of a past, too, in a way). Basically, the pacing just felt off. I think I would've liked there to be a more plausible span between "first kiss" and "adopting a child together" -- though that could be intentional. I mean, Mori is remembering their whole life (ahead) together, and has been for many years, and Thaniel seems quite willing to accept a lot from Mori on faith, so why not that. But also with pacing in general it occurs to me that the change from very slow build up to rapid resolution could be intentional -- like a final bit of clockwork snapping into place and setting off the whole Rube Goldberg machine built up expressly to accept that final bit. But while there are narrative structures that can work well with that (heist stories, basically), it feels weird with the tone and pacing of this particular story...
I am sad for the squandered relationship between Thaniel and Grace -- not squandered in a way where I had expected a romantic relationship between them to develop, or would have wanted one, but I do feel sorry for the alliance that was lost, because that could've been really interesting in a longer term, and I feel like the resolution was kind of a copout. But alas, earwax. I did like Grace's sudden realization that the calm is what Thaniel's anger looks like, the moments where his words and tone are at odds.
Actually in general I found Thaniel a lot more moving than I'd expected to. He's a much quieter protagonist that I normally go in for, but his resigned decency just worked for me. I liked everything about Thaniel and piano-playing -- the self-deprecating way he talks about having learned to play ("My... father was a gamekeeper at a big house, and the gentleman there was a concert pianist with no children. He was bursting to teach. If I'd said no, he would have tried the dog."), the palpable ache when he's locked himself away from it because he needs to make a living, the realization that it is all there when he sits down at the piano again ("He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down.") -- everything about that arc was marvelously done. I was moved by the decent and unassuming way Thaniel has of interacting with everyone -- other clerks at the Home Office, Dolly, the telegraphist at the post office he randomly encounters, and by him smuggling tea into his own wedding. And I was really moved by him seeing his sister again: "The rest of her was dull too. He hadn't recognized her when she had arrived on the sleeper from Edingburgh, and when he had, he had cried and pretended it was because he was happy." I like the synaesthesea, too; not something I've encountered in a character before (that I can recall, anyway, so if I have, it can't have been very memorable), and I liked the way that worked (including with that being the reason Thaniel was able to identify the carrier of the bomb), and would have actually welcomed more of it.
Oddly, I don't find Mori poignant pretty much at all. I find him INTERESTING, the emotional dilemmas of his condition, being nostalgic for things he doesn't yet have and things that may never happen at all, knowing up front the things he will lose, forgetting things as they stop being possibilities and being left only with the written-down memories of them. I like the way these things are signaled in the book -- his disappearing and reappearing Northern accent, him not being able to remember past the explosion because he doesn't see a possibility of surviving it, even the way his fear of heights is retroactively explained by having to jump off the roof. But it's all sort of intellectual appreciation, rather than tugging on my heartstrings. IDK, maybe I've used up all my memories-of-the-future feelings on [spoiler]U-Janus in Ponedelnik when I was eleven...
Random other things:
I found Fanshaw and Sullivan amusing and fun background characters. Fanshaw and his embroidery as a way of staving off 'gentle madness' and manner of coming out with things like: "But you didn't go to Eton and you're fortunate enough not to be the second son of an earl, so you can get away with bad manners, no, wait for the end of the sentence; would you mind continuing to make friends with her in a socially clunky but determined way for which I will be eternally grateful while I in my gentlemanly meekness fail to get a word in edgewise?" And Sullivan: "Anybody found to have double-booked himself therefore will be summarily beheaded. [...] Oh, isn't that delightful. You all think I'm joking."
Reading about the science was interesting and weird all at once. I enjoyed Grace setting up her actual physics experiement, and setting up the experiment with Mori. I enjoyed that nobody jumped to conclusions about the apparently paranormal events, but carefully investigated other possibilities until the paranormal hypothesis clearly had more support. But the weird thing was reading about a world where ether is apparently an actual thing, rather than a disproven theory. That was kind of brain-bendy. I did like Mori's confirmation that Grace was on the edge of a major discovery about ether.
I didn't realize when I was reading the book that Ito was a real actual historical person (Hirobumi Ito), although it doesn't seem like the son of a bookseller thing is true? Or maybe just too obscure for Wikipedia. He was ultimately assassinated, too, though only after becoming the first Prime Minister of Japan. Kuroda is historical, too: the second Prime Minister.
One thing I found really interesting was the way in which Mori's political views/support for social causes stemeed from his knowledge of future events, and the way he expressed the knowledge which contemporaries would take as a (grumpy) opinion, while what he was saying was essentially historical fact, like Mori explaining why he doesn't support the suffragette movement ("Women won't have a vote until it's in the fiscal interest of the state to give it to them; They'll have it when all able-bodied men die and not before. Protesting now is pointless.") or answering the lightly-asked question of whether Westerners would take Japan seriously now, after the construction of the hall ("The moment they take Japan seriously will be the moment she defeats an existing Western power in a war of sufficient significance."); I imagine this has to refer to the Russo-Japanese War (Mori was born in 1845, he could still easily be alive in 1928 when women get the vote in the UK.)
Also, Thaniel notices that Mori's orrery has two extra outer planets "spinning around each other as well as the sun. He wasn't suprised. Only reading the newspaper on the night shift was a good way to miss major astronomical discoveries." I thought at first this was planets discovered later that Mori knows about through his future memories, but I don't think this actually matches anything. Pluto and Eris were discovered later (1930 and 2005 respectively; Neptune was discovered in 1846, so would already be known at this point, presumably to Thaniel as well). But that doesn't make sense, right, because Mori wouldn't live long enough to know about those discoveries (unless he's got other peculiarities, too, besides being able to see the future in ether). But maybe it's that he's discovered them himself, like super-advanced clockwork.
Finally, it was a bit weird to read this book on the heels of a Whyborne & Griffin binge. W&G is set in America, but in a similar timeframe, and, of course, is also m/m with a lady scientist, but the similarities don't go very deep at all. Grace and Christine are really not very similar (and Grace is probably a much more plausible example of a lady scientist than Christine is, even though I love Christine and she is a ton of fun). It's just such a difference between the books, in terms of both prose and melodrama, it was interesting to have both in my head at the same time. (And then I went on to read about more gay paranormal Victorian gentlemen, with Death by Silver. I seem to be kind of on a roll...)
Quotes:
"'You haven't got anything anyone would want to steal,' George [the beggar] growled, with an authority that Thaniel decided not to question just for the moment."
"There were vague prospects of becoming an assistant senior clerk at some point this year. He had been pleased about that when he heard, then horrified to be pleased, because being pleased with something so boring meant that without noticing, at no particular point that he could see, he had shrunk to fit the job."
"Katsu stole his other sock and flopped on to the floor with an unbiological bang, whereupon it octopused out of the open door and slid down the banister."
Thaniel: "What's Japan like?"
Mori: "Very similar to England. People have their factories and their politics and their preoccupation with tea."
[Thaniel] was forging a signature [to requisition a wastebasket for the Yard relocated to the Home Office basement] when the senior clerk stopped by him.
"Good God, Steepleton, go home. Before you bleed all over the telegraphs."
"Thank you, sir."
"Is that my signature?"
"Yes."
He considered. "Good. Carry on."
"It was exactly the same now as it had been four years ago when he had first taken the tenancy. Everything since then had been nothing but laps."
"He knew the name, but he couldn't think. His tired brain gave him wolves. No; loupes."
Six: You've got a stupid girl's name.
Mori: No. That would be Keiko. I'm Keita. Your idea of gender markers is nationally subjective.
Six: What does that mean?
Mori: Stupid.
"The senior clerk glided by on roller-skates. Thaniel didn't ask why. He had got up that morning to find Katsu nesting in his suitcase, which had altered his gauge of strangeness for the day."
"Light travels in straight lines, but is a wave. Not for the first time, her brain bumped against the question of what, exactly, was doing the waving."
After Thaniel locks up Katsu: "the victory soon felt guilt-tinged. Very big to have outwitted a little mechanical octopus whose only ambition was the acquisition of socks. [...] After looking down at him for a little while, he tucked some of the last remaining socks around him by way of apology." And later: "There was a crash from upstairs that sounded a lot like an octopus breaking through the back of a dresser. 'Katsu seems all right,' Mori observed."
"Matsumoto was bulletproof: anything that was not a compliment pinged off him and hit an innocent bystander."
Thaniel: Thaniel. Steepleton.
Grace: Like Nathaniel?
"Yes, but my dad was Nat, so..." He tipped his head as he trailed off, in a way that suggested he had explained it often already tonight, mainly to people wou couldn't pronounce a 'th' anyway.
Grace: "No, no. Glad to be of service; it will make up for my useless damselling last night."
"She was reasonably sure that Mori would want to help with the experiments whether he liked her or not, for the sake of hurrying along a future he was no doubt bored of waiting for"
Mori entering Grace's lab: "He came in slowly, like somebody else's cat."
Mori on the science of ether: "It's like listening to blidn people with no sense of touch prove atom by atom the existence and possible features of an elephant when I'm not even very interested in elephants."
Trying to explain "needlemouse" to Thaniel: "I've just written annual hedgehog income in the middle of my expenses column."
Grace: I'm afraid of him because if he ever gets tired of me, he will be able to convince you that you are too.
Thaniel: "It would be interested if we could imagine for half a minute that I'm in possession of more common sense than a chicken," he said quietly.
"I'm not allergic to anything but yellow liquorice allsorts and those haven't been invented yet."
"Instead [Mori] hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future."
SF bingo: steampunk
Random House bingo: illustrated cover
25. Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold, Death by Silver -- continuing in the vein of paranormal Victorians (and the first of my purchases from the Lethe Press sale, which is still ongoing for a few more days till the end of March, btw). I've had these recommended to me by a couple of folks and they sounded very much like my sort of thing -- mystery-fantasy with forensic magic, just in a historical setting and canonical m/m between the leads (although it's definitely mystery first and romance second). And it did work quite well for me, and I've already started the sequel and am happy to hear that there will be more, apparently. Spoilers!
Somehow I'd gotten the impression that the two leads started out as rivals or something, which is not true at all. I'd never quite read a set-up like this, though I know it's not at all uncommon in romance novels -- they're actually childhood friends (with a lot of shared trauma from their awful boarding school experience) who drifted apart while at university, and are reconnecting now that they're establishing themselves as professionals, Julian as a private detective and Ned as a metaphysician. Together they fight crime, or at least solve a mystery implicating the family of a bully from their school days.
The magic is quite neat, and unlike other systems of magic I've encountered. It's both academic and industrial: there are scientific magazines devoted to metaphysics, historical research, different schools in different countries and even slight variations between the Oxford and Cambridge traditions (which helps with the forensic magic), and it's also used in very practical and prosaic applications, keeping the family silver shining, making sure gates stay latched, that sort of thing, and metaphysicians seem to be something like white-collar craftsmen. Also, apparently there's a magical equivalent of drugs, enchantments written with special ink and consumed by drinking, which it sounds like Julian might have a bit of a problem with. Anyway, the magic is reliant on grammar, which uses symbols and tags and sounds a lot like programming, actually, and while I could not follow all the intricacies, I was amused by the various pedantic discussions (like whether or not one can use irrational numbers in magic squares) and liked the descritpion of diagnostics with this type of magic, which sounds a whole lot like troubleshooting. Oh, and I like the acknowledgement that metaphysicians specialize, and while Ned could figure out some medical magic if he had some time and a reference book, it's not something he can do on the fly. It's not a system as inherently delightful to me as elemental magic or as intuitively CORRECT as Rothfuss's applied thermodynamics, but it's a neat system to poke around in, and I look forward to learning more about it. Visiting one of the co-author's LJ, I found a lot more info about metaphysics here.
I quite like the characters. Especially Julian, the detective, who is cerebral, uninterested in sports or music but is pathological about people-watching and can't resist showing off his deductions, doesn't have much patience for people (like his long-suffering landlady) but is perfectly happy to hang around with the criminal element as long as they have interesting things to tell him, and is otherwise the type of character I tend to like -- a first in these paranormal m/m actually. I especially like what we see of young Julian in the Sts Thomas flashbacks -- that stubborn and incandescent indignation about a world that doesn't follow proper rules that felt very familiar to me from certain people I live with :P Some quotes to that effect:
"Julian had a strong sense of right and wrong, but it didn't always follow established lines."
"You said before you weren't serious."
Ned frowned at him. "i never did."
"You did," Julian said, the same despearately stubborn note rising in his voice as when he'd been expected to repeat falsehoods at school. "When we were at Oxford. You said we were too old for that sort of thing."
"I suppose I might have," Ned said, feeling suddenly a bit ashamed of himself. He hadn't thought Julian remembered that, although Julian had an unfortunate tendency one ever said.
There's enough of Sherlock Holmes in him, in the combination of brilliant and childish, that I find him an appealing and intriguing character, and actually want to read more specifically to spend time with him.
I like Ned, too, as a soothing and stabilizing influence for Julian, mostly. I mean, Ned is a really nice guy, and I like his amiable nature which charms all comers, and I especially like the way he enjoys spending time with women in general and his relationship with his secretary Miss Frost in particular. Miss Frost herself is really great, and seems to have serious potential as both a metaphysician and detective, judging by her unraveling spell and by the glee with which she takes to figuring out Mrs Nevett's source of illicit enchantments, so I'm looking forward to seeing her develop both skills further in the sequel, and just seeing more of her in general. And while I'm talking about characters, I might as well mention that I also liked Bolster, the retired cracksman who is Julian's connection to the underworld -- I'm not even sure why, but he was probably my second-favorite character overall -- and Hatton, the Scotland Yard inspector who, it looks like, will be even more of a staple in book 2.
This is also one of the first m/m stories where I see why the principals are together, other than just "because they're the leads" or (not to be dismissed in a Victorian setting where homosexuality is a crime) "because they're both gay and have managed to figure this out about each other". Ned and Julian have a long, long history together, going back to when they were twelve and Ned was Julian's only friend, and there's enough complications to their history that the two of them getting together feels both right and not inevitable. I'm not a huge fan of romantic misunderstandings, but I could definitely believe Ned being hurt by Julian seeming to throw him over in favor of his clever new university friends who made fun of Ned ("I shouldn't have let them do that [...] I suppose it was just that they were very clever."), back in Oxford, and thus feeling like he doesn't mean much to Julian, and could also buy Julian being convinced that Ned was simply biding time until he had enough money to marry, and so wasn't a serious prospect. And even if they hadn't been believable, at least these were more interesting reasons to doubt their compatibility / possibility for a serious relationship than I've encountered before.
Oh, and their accidental pet carnivorous plant which they feed ham rinds over breakfast and which nipped Ned's ear while they were making out on Julian's couch is oddly adorable.
The book is a mystery, so I should definitely talk about plot. I've left it for last (or almost last) because it felt weaker to me than the worldbuilding or characters. Too many loose ends (for example, there was another couple at dinner the night Edgar Nevett was murdered, and nobody even talks to them, or thinks about them at all; I kept expecting them to turn out to have some significance, but they didn't), too many times where Ned and Julian said "well, it can't be them or them or them" while neglecting to disposition another character (e.g. they decide that Victor must be protecting his mother or his brothers with his false confession, but it's not clear to me why at that point they did not consider that he could be protecting his wife; she has no clear motive, and later cooperates with their investigation so after a while I was ready to believe that it wasn't her, but they have no reason to dismiss her from consideration right then...) I figured out that Makins had been hired to burgle Nevett and killed off afterwards so he couldn't talk about it well before the protagonists did. I also kept expecting SOMETHING dramatic to happen with Ellis when they go to confront the murderer, but nothing did -- he told them he wouldn't confess or kill himself to protect the family, they told him fine, they'd go to the police, and they did, and he was arrested and convicted. This made the book feel weirdly without a climax; or, rather, the action climax seems to be the rescue of Annie Makins (which I did like, especially Julian suggesting starting a fire at the gas-works and Ned prudently amending that to an ILLUSION of fire, which works exactly as planned), and not the actual resolution of the mystery itself.
Sts Thomas, the boarding school from which Julian and Ned know each other is a huge part of this book, both the background for both men and their connection to the family affected by the murder. I'm not sure how plausible all this is -- the school seemed like such an improbably awful place, but then I also think that about many people's accounts of their middle/high school experience in the real world... But I did like that Julian had never forgiven Victor and had to be talked into not letting him hang for a false confession, and that with the aid of the same logic Ned had used on him to talk him out of putting arsenic in the prefects' tea when they were thriteen: you will always know you could have done it. And that Ned felt that he should have moved on and left behind his feelings about Victor (who whipped him bloody in school) and is angry at himself, feels himself to be weak and foolish, for not being able to do so. I also liked the way Victor ended up being shown -- as someone who *is* a bully, arrogant and not very clever, but who does have positive qualities -- the way he was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of his brother, though he may not have fully believed what he was signing up for with the confession -- and the way the three brothers talk about each other.
A couple of quotes:
"Julian had found friends of his own there for the first time, dramatic young men who were scathingly clever and made bantering references to poetry Ned hadn't read and wore green carnations, or at least talked about wearing them."
"We generally try to do without the assistance of private detectives at the Yard," Hatton said. "it's felt that's what they pay us for."
*
Assorted dispatches:
SKZB reports he is halfway done with the draft of Vallista, and expects to be finished with the draft in about 3 months. So Vallista is looking like a late-2017 book. *waits impatiently*
O finished Etiquette and Espionage, the first Sophronia book, and we talked about it for his reading log. He said he liked Sophronia a lot, because she's "stubborn and sneaky" (heh, I know another one like that), and wants to read the sequels. And L is starting to read Fangirl, less because I recommended it to her and more because a friend in school did (said friend is reading Carry On right now and not liking it as much); we'll see what she thinks of it, but for now she's annoyed at the off-brand Harry Potter-ness of Simon Snow :P
On a similar but more significant note, we also showed Monty Python's Life of Brian to the rodents (for the first time) tonight. A bunch of it was clearly over O's head, though less over L's, but they both laughed a ton, especially at the stoning and everything with Biggus Dickus (but B was laughing even harder). I was especially happy that L at least seemed to appreciate my favorite bit, which is the "Romans go home" grammar lesson. (ETA: LOL, it just occurred to me that this is an interesting choice of movie for 'erev Easter' XD That had definitely not been planned -- we'd been talking about watching it for a couple of weeks -- but kind of amusing the way it worked out nevertheless...)
There is a resolution in the book that I am still unsure about (those who have read it know exactly what I mean, I'm sure, because everyone seems to have the same set of reservations, however they manage to come to terms with it). There's no way to talk about that unspoilerly, and it doesn't (I think) weaken the book. But it's there, and I'm actually glad that I was forewarned about it, so, passing on a vague warning of my own.
So, with SPOILERS! Enter at your own risk:
My favorite thing about the book (hands up anyone who's surprised!) was Katsu the clockwork octopus. Although it turns out that being a clockwork octupus is not sufficient to dodge the curse where my favorite character pretty much always tends to die. :(
I liked all the human characters, too, though I do think it's interesting that everyone comes across as sympathetic at first, but actually all of the three main characters have some interesting traits that are really sort of eyebrow-raise-y. Grace is the obvious one, of course, and I'll get to her later, and Mori is an interesting case, but even on-the-surface-saintly Thaniel who is martyring himself for the sake of supporting his widowed sister, is willing to marry Grace so she can have her laboratory, is kind to junior clerks, feels bad about bleeding on a borrowed shirt, and feels like having been through the Yard bombing and speaking Japanese he's well qualified for disarming Ito's would-be assassin -- Thaniel, too, has some interesting facets: he is really very facile with lying, including to people he is close enough to that he should probably not be lying to them. One can definitely understand why he'd get in the habit -- he is essentially forced to live a lie, given his sexuality, but he seems to have fewer qualms about it than I would expect.
I *like* Mori, with his quietly resigned loneliness and his quiet humour and his hidden presents of arranged opportunity and his grumpy quirks and his clockwork octopus, but I admit I'm leery of the notion that one person gets to have that power and is not shy about using it, and also how he chooses to use it. He saves Thaniel's life with the present of the watch (and draws him to the shop on Filigree Street), but, as he and Thaniel talk at the end, he does not actually defuse the bomb or cause it to be discovered. Yes, OK, if he'd come to Scotland Yard with an accusation of Spindle, it probably wouldn't have gone over well, but come on, this is a man who thwarted an assassin by planting weeds for six months -- Williamson doesn't know this, but Mori had plenty of other means available to him than just pointing a finger. I can't fault him for essentially killing the first three assassins after Ito (especially if he tried to warn them away first, as he seems to have done with #4 and #5 at least) -- I mean, a bodyguard shooting a would-be assassin would certainly be justified, right? -- but the thing with his cousin and the wall is less clearcut. We see that Takahiro was very cruel to him, even in the presence of others, and probably worse without visitors around, but, worst-case, Mori arranged it so that the wall would collapse and bury Takahiro, and best case, he simply didn't warn him. So that's... interesting. And then there's the unsettling comment about Ito's wife being allergic to bees, which Mori has been keeping not-as-pets. And it's not actually anything Mori *does* -- maybe even something he knows he will never actually need to do, because in all possible futures Ito's reaction is to let him go just based on the threat -- and Ito wanted to keep Mori locked up after he found out, so it's not exactly unprompted. But that's a lot of power, and a lot of precedent, and I can't blame Grace for being worried.
OK then, Grace. I liked Grace a lot from her introduction -- lady scientist at Oxford, my sort of thing entirely. She is in a difficult and stupidly artificial predicament, and easy o sympathize with. I even entirely believe her capable of the things she ultimately does -- trying to frame Mori to get Thaniel away from him, setting what she thinks will be a relatively harmless explosive, using Katsu to carry the bomb, the admission that if she'd known that an accusation of sodomy would've put Mori in jail then she would've gone with that, even the way she treats Alice the maid when she wants to be sure her experiment with the extra ace is "clean". Because I do think Grace is -- OK, this will be totally useless for anyone except egelantier, I expect, but anyway -- Grace is an Athyra, I think: somebody who prioritizes her work, and the advancement of knowledge, above people, and someone who would, quite likely, go efficiently about solving a problem like how to thwart someone who can see the future except for random events without stopping to consider anything like moral implications or possible collateral damage. That part was actually really neat! And she's got the Athyra coldness; it's clear she and her parents don't get along, but her reaction to her mother's death (apparently unfaked reaction) seems remarkably blase for that. It's not that she's without empathy -- I actually liked that she has a moment of empathy for Yuki, "an unhappy child with an idiot for a father. She could remember being that.", regrets the possibility that he may be blamed for the explosion because of his Clan na Gael connections, and wants to protect him from that by keeping him with her so he cannot be blamed for it. She doesn't mean to actually physically harm Mori, checks that he's breathing and drags him to safety in the tunnel. And she is sorry to destroy Katsu, but for an Athyra sort of reason: "She felt wretched. It was a beautiful peice of machinery. Nobody would see anything like it again for a hundred years if Mori decided not to make another." But it's very narrow empathy, and I do think she has that Athyra tendency to treat people like things (which is, ironically, what she accuses Mori of doing with Thaniel).
Anyway, so I could see Grace doing all the things she did, if she had to / felt she had to, but I don't really buy her motivation to do so, right when she does. And I'm not entirely sure how much of this is bug vs feature, but it didn't quite hold together for me, so I don't think it's all feature, at least. Is Grace genuinely worried about Thaniel, what she tells him after, that she's concerned Mori is turning him into a "clockwork puppet"? It could be a legitimate worry, but I didn't get that from Grace's POV, just from her words to Thaniel later. So does that mean that's just an excuse? Is she driven just by fear of Mori (Matsumoto has been telling her about him killing his cousin, after all), or jealousy, since she takes action right after she discovers Thaniel and Mori together? But her actions feel too rational for a 'crime of passion' motivated by jealousy or fear. I mean, Grace is an imminently rational person, but even taking that into account it feels too... cool. It would make sense for her to be motivated by fear of losing Thaniel to Mori (since it is quite clear that Mori disapproves of her), and with him losing the house and lab, but if that's the case, it seems like it would make more sense to, well, do something less drastic and more sensible than what she does, because if she is motivated by rational, long-term considerations, it would make sense to take the time to come up with a long-term plan. Except, of course, that Grace feels that she can't actually plan, because if she makes a decision, Mori will know it and be able to move against her. Which is an interesting aspect of this whole thing -- and I actually really liked how that part was done, both from the perspective of Grace planning or not-planning -- holding the individual steps in her mind like two numbers she's carrying to an abacus, taking each individual step in turn, making decisions by coin-toss so that Mori can't predict them (and the 10 minutes headstart she inadvertently gives him at Victoria station by tossing the coin for the next stop just as the train pulls away instead of just as it arrives) -- but because she isn't really planning or thinking about it, it's hard to follow why she IS doing the things she's doing, enough to find her actions believable. Or at least it was for me. But maybe that's the intent, this weird mix of rational and emotion-driven and piecemeal... But still, it's hard to get one's hands/mind around...
I think this is maybe kind of a case of wanting to have one's cake and eat it, too -- a sympathetic antagonist -- although it would not have felt right to have any other kind in this book. Or simply trying to do something that's very difficult to accomplish in writing because it relies on thought processes that are far less linear than 'normal' stream-of-consciousness stuff, let alone a well-organized narrative. I think getting Grace's point of view on what happened in retrospective doesn't help -- it's great for tension and suspense, because it does look like something might have happened to her at first, though Thaniel doesn't actually suspect Mori, and it allows for suspense about what had happened to Mori, too, with his forgetting English words and having fallen on the tracks. But I think maybe it makes it harder to understand Grace's motivations and train of thought, looking back on it rather than living it with her in the moment.
(Quite interesting, too, is that when Grace first becomes convinced Mori's gift is real, she has the following conversation with Alice the maid:
Alice: It can't be safe to upset a man who knows the future. What's to stop him making sure that you stray into a carriage crash or under a falling pile of bricks. [which is an especially interesting choice of words given how Takahiro died, not that Alice knows about that.]
Grace: Human decency, same as everyone else. [though she looks troubled, and it's clear this is when she starts thinking of the danger]
I'm still puzzled by the pear trees incident, too; even rereading, that feels like such a weird note to me, and I'm not sure I'm getting out of it what I'm supposed to. Is Grace jealous of Mori's gift with the ether here? There's a great line in her thoughts: "In those stories there was always someone who was too unmagic to hear the trees speaking or see the elves in the branches, or who the woods quietly closed out of their own accord. She had never thought it would be her." Is she reacting to his threat/what she perceives as his threat? (But if so, doing something to antagonize him seems ill-advised. Unless she's trying to prove she's not afraid of him... She tells Nathaniel not to shout at Mori for talking to her like that because she doesn't want him angrier, so... It just seems very strange.) Thoughts from others?
While we're speaking of Grace, the thing with Grace and Matsumoto at the end is kind of out of the blue -- not the affection between them, which feels real behind the jokey insults and teasing, and not even Matsumoto's interest in her -- he does seem regretful and sulky around her wedding, which could be jealousy easily, and even before Thaniel he jumps to her defense in front of his friends with uncharacteristic fierceness. (Matsumoto attempting to deliver to Grace a lecture on the birds and the bees was hilarious, btw.) But the sudden intimacy, "Call me Akira" -- it forms a nice mirroring with Thaniel calling Mori "Keita" for the first time, after the early explanation by Mori of what first-name-basis means in Japan ("In Japan, first names are only for who you're married to, or if you're being rude."), and feels like too much too soon, and there just for the symmetry.
Because (above disclaimer about it being read unspoiled nonwithstanding, which was mentioned in all the spoilery reviews on my flist) I'm incapable of reading books unspoiled -- yes, I click on all your painstaking spoiler-cuts, sorry! :P -- but had read the spoilers a long time ago, I wasn't sure, as I was reading, whether I remembered correctly that the book was canonincal Thaniel/Mori or if it was something I had only imagined/had been thinking about a different book. In retrospect, it occurs to me that this is actually a PERFECT way to read this book, since it dovetails so uncannily with Mori's own perception/memories of futures where it does and doesn't happen.
I liked the dynamic between Thaniel and Mori a lot, but not in a way where them becoming an actual couple at the end changed things appreciably for me beyond them living together. The domesticity early on was every bit as cozy and sweet: Thaniel getting used to drinking green tea so that brown tea starts feeling weird, getting used to the warmth at which Mori always keeps his rooms, arguing good-naturedly about Katsu and ... and all kinds of things, Mori rescuing Thaniel's watercolors of music from the wastebasket and hanging it up next to the Van Gogh (wise investment possibilities there! and it just occurs to me that knowing the future is probably part of the source of Mori's riches, hmm... it would definitely help invest one's existing fortune wisely so it multiplies), the present of the opportunity to play piano for Sullivan, the present of weather (which is nicely set up by Thaniel breaking an earlier vial), and the music box for a child that does not yet exist.
I do like the way their relationship makes the change -- that it's Thaniel not-asking a question but deciding to ask, and Mori seeing that decision -- it is such a quiet and intimate act, and unique to this book, that it worked really, really well. But it feels like it almost doesn't matter. I mean, they are both lonely, of course, and having additional happiness through an actual relationship is not something I begrudge them at all. But it seems almost superfluous to the relationship that already exists, maybe thanks to the weird time tricks again... It's not something that bothers me, and there were a couple of lines that I did find poignant, mostly from the age-difference angle (which is something I can empathize with), when Thaniel tells Mori he wishes he'd come five years earlier and Mori replies "You weren't my Thaniel yet. [...] You wouldn't have liked me." and when Thaniel has a (non-paranormal) flash forward seeing himself bereaved later in life because Mori is quite a bit older than him.
I also like Mori's relationship with Six, though Thaniel essentially deciding to adopt her on the spot feels a little sudden. In general, though, the last 25% of the book, in which pretty much EVERYTHING happens, feel quite rushed, compared to the slow build-up for the first two parts. I think I would have preferred the pacing to be more even, to see Grace actually believably reach the point where she felt she had to do what she did, to see Thaniel and Mori negotiating this new normal and the loss it means to both of them (but especially to Mori, since it's a loss of a past, too, in a way). Basically, the pacing just felt off. I think I would've liked there to be a more plausible span between "first kiss" and "adopting a child together" -- though that could be intentional. I mean, Mori is remembering their whole life (ahead) together, and has been for many years, and Thaniel seems quite willing to accept a lot from Mori on faith, so why not that. But also with pacing in general it occurs to me that the change from very slow build up to rapid resolution could be intentional -- like a final bit of clockwork snapping into place and setting off the whole Rube Goldberg machine built up expressly to accept that final bit. But while there are narrative structures that can work well with that (heist stories, basically), it feels weird with the tone and pacing of this particular story...
I am sad for the squandered relationship between Thaniel and Grace -- not squandered in a way where I had expected a romantic relationship between them to develop, or would have wanted one, but I do feel sorry for the alliance that was lost, because that could've been really interesting in a longer term, and I feel like the resolution was kind of a copout. But alas, earwax. I did like Grace's sudden realization that the calm is what Thaniel's anger looks like, the moments where his words and tone are at odds.
Actually in general I found Thaniel a lot more moving than I'd expected to. He's a much quieter protagonist that I normally go in for, but his resigned decency just worked for me. I liked everything about Thaniel and piano-playing -- the self-deprecating way he talks about having learned to play ("My... father was a gamekeeper at a big house, and the gentleman there was a concert pianist with no children. He was bursting to teach. If I'd said no, he would have tried the dog."), the palpable ache when he's locked himself away from it because he needs to make a living, the realization that it is all there when he sits down at the piano again ("He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down.") -- everything about that arc was marvelously done. I was moved by the decent and unassuming way Thaniel has of interacting with everyone -- other clerks at the Home Office, Dolly, the telegraphist at the post office he randomly encounters, and by him smuggling tea into his own wedding. And I was really moved by him seeing his sister again: "The rest of her was dull too. He hadn't recognized her when she had arrived on the sleeper from Edingburgh, and when he had, he had cried and pretended it was because he was happy." I like the synaesthesea, too; not something I've encountered in a character before (that I can recall, anyway, so if I have, it can't have been very memorable), and I liked the way that worked (including with that being the reason Thaniel was able to identify the carrier of the bomb), and would have actually welcomed more of it.
Oddly, I don't find Mori poignant pretty much at all. I find him INTERESTING, the emotional dilemmas of his condition, being nostalgic for things he doesn't yet have and things that may never happen at all, knowing up front the things he will lose, forgetting things as they stop being possibilities and being left only with the written-down memories of them. I like the way these things are signaled in the book -- his disappearing and reappearing Northern accent, him not being able to remember past the explosion because he doesn't see a possibility of surviving it, even the way his fear of heights is retroactively explained by having to jump off the roof. But it's all sort of intellectual appreciation, rather than tugging on my heartstrings. IDK, maybe I've used up all my memories-of-the-future feelings on [spoiler]U-Janus in Ponedelnik when I was eleven...
Random other things:
I found Fanshaw and Sullivan amusing and fun background characters. Fanshaw and his embroidery as a way of staving off 'gentle madness' and manner of coming out with things like: "But you didn't go to Eton and you're fortunate enough not to be the second son of an earl, so you can get away with bad manners, no, wait for the end of the sentence; would you mind continuing to make friends with her in a socially clunky but determined way for which I will be eternally grateful while I in my gentlemanly meekness fail to get a word in edgewise?" And Sullivan: "Anybody found to have double-booked himself therefore will be summarily beheaded. [...] Oh, isn't that delightful. You all think I'm joking."
Reading about the science was interesting and weird all at once. I enjoyed Grace setting up her actual physics experiement, and setting up the experiment with Mori. I enjoyed that nobody jumped to conclusions about the apparently paranormal events, but carefully investigated other possibilities until the paranormal hypothesis clearly had more support. But the weird thing was reading about a world where ether is apparently an actual thing, rather than a disproven theory. That was kind of brain-bendy. I did like Mori's confirmation that Grace was on the edge of a major discovery about ether.
I didn't realize when I was reading the book that Ito was a real actual historical person (Hirobumi Ito), although it doesn't seem like the son of a bookseller thing is true? Or maybe just too obscure for Wikipedia. He was ultimately assassinated, too, though only after becoming the first Prime Minister of Japan. Kuroda is historical, too: the second Prime Minister.
One thing I found really interesting was the way in which Mori's political views/support for social causes stemeed from his knowledge of future events, and the way he expressed the knowledge which contemporaries would take as a (grumpy) opinion, while what he was saying was essentially historical fact, like Mori explaining why he doesn't support the suffragette movement ("Women won't have a vote until it's in the fiscal interest of the state to give it to them; They'll have it when all able-bodied men die and not before. Protesting now is pointless.") or answering the lightly-asked question of whether Westerners would take Japan seriously now, after the construction of the hall ("The moment they take Japan seriously will be the moment she defeats an existing Western power in a war of sufficient significance."); I imagine this has to refer to the Russo-Japanese War (Mori was born in 1845, he could still easily be alive in 1928 when women get the vote in the UK.)
Also, Thaniel notices that Mori's orrery has two extra outer planets "spinning around each other as well as the sun. He wasn't suprised. Only reading the newspaper on the night shift was a good way to miss major astronomical discoveries." I thought at first this was planets discovered later that Mori knows about through his future memories, but I don't think this actually matches anything. Pluto and Eris were discovered later (1930 and 2005 respectively; Neptune was discovered in 1846, so would already be known at this point, presumably to Thaniel as well). But that doesn't make sense, right, because Mori wouldn't live long enough to know about those discoveries (unless he's got other peculiarities, too, besides being able to see the future in ether). But maybe it's that he's discovered them himself, like super-advanced clockwork.
Finally, it was a bit weird to read this book on the heels of a Whyborne & Griffin binge. W&G is set in America, but in a similar timeframe, and, of course, is also m/m with a lady scientist, but the similarities don't go very deep at all. Grace and Christine are really not very similar (and Grace is probably a much more plausible example of a lady scientist than Christine is, even though I love Christine and she is a ton of fun). It's just such a difference between the books, in terms of both prose and melodrama, it was interesting to have both in my head at the same time. (And then I went on to read about more gay paranormal Victorian gentlemen, with Death by Silver. I seem to be kind of on a roll...)
Quotes:
"'You haven't got anything anyone would want to steal,' George [the beggar] growled, with an authority that Thaniel decided not to question just for the moment."
"There were vague prospects of becoming an assistant senior clerk at some point this year. He had been pleased about that when he heard, then horrified to be pleased, because being pleased with something so boring meant that without noticing, at no particular point that he could see, he had shrunk to fit the job."
"Katsu stole his other sock and flopped on to the floor with an unbiological bang, whereupon it octopused out of the open door and slid down the banister."
Thaniel: "What's Japan like?"
Mori: "Very similar to England. People have their factories and their politics and their preoccupation with tea."
[Thaniel] was forging a signature [to requisition a wastebasket for the Yard relocated to the Home Office basement] when the senior clerk stopped by him.
"Good God, Steepleton, go home. Before you bleed all over the telegraphs."
"Thank you, sir."
"Is that my signature?"
"Yes."
He considered. "Good. Carry on."
"It was exactly the same now as it had been four years ago when he had first taken the tenancy. Everything since then had been nothing but laps."
"He knew the name, but he couldn't think. His tired brain gave him wolves. No; loupes."
Six: You've got a stupid girl's name.
Mori: No. That would be Keiko. I'm Keita. Your idea of gender markers is nationally subjective.
Six: What does that mean?
Mori: Stupid.
"The senior clerk glided by on roller-skates. Thaniel didn't ask why. He had got up that morning to find Katsu nesting in his suitcase, which had altered his gauge of strangeness for the day."
"Light travels in straight lines, but is a wave. Not for the first time, her brain bumped against the question of what, exactly, was doing the waving."
After Thaniel locks up Katsu: "the victory soon felt guilt-tinged. Very big to have outwitted a little mechanical octopus whose only ambition was the acquisition of socks. [...] After looking down at him for a little while, he tucked some of the last remaining socks around him by way of apology." And later: "There was a crash from upstairs that sounded a lot like an octopus breaking through the back of a dresser. 'Katsu seems all right,' Mori observed."
"Matsumoto was bulletproof: anything that was not a compliment pinged off him and hit an innocent bystander."
Thaniel: Thaniel. Steepleton.
Grace: Like Nathaniel?
"Yes, but my dad was Nat, so..." He tipped his head as he trailed off, in a way that suggested he had explained it often already tonight, mainly to people wou couldn't pronounce a 'th' anyway.
Grace: "No, no. Glad to be of service; it will make up for my useless damselling last night."
"She was reasonably sure that Mori would want to help with the experiments whether he liked her or not, for the sake of hurrying along a future he was no doubt bored of waiting for"
Mori entering Grace's lab: "He came in slowly, like somebody else's cat."
Mori on the science of ether: "It's like listening to blidn people with no sense of touch prove atom by atom the existence and possible features of an elephant when I'm not even very interested in elephants."
Trying to explain "needlemouse" to Thaniel: "I've just written annual hedgehog income in the middle of my expenses column."
Grace: I'm afraid of him because if he ever gets tired of me, he will be able to convince you that you are too.
Thaniel: "It would be interested if we could imagine for half a minute that I'm in possession of more common sense than a chicken," he said quietly.
"I'm not allergic to anything but yellow liquorice allsorts and those haven't been invented yet."
"Instead [Mori] hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future."
SF bingo: steampunk
Random House bingo: illustrated cover
25. Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold, Death by Silver -- continuing in the vein of paranormal Victorians (and the first of my purchases from the Lethe Press sale, which is still ongoing for a few more days till the end of March, btw). I've had these recommended to me by a couple of folks and they sounded very much like my sort of thing -- mystery-fantasy with forensic magic, just in a historical setting and canonical m/m between the leads (although it's definitely mystery first and romance second). And it did work quite well for me, and I've already started the sequel and am happy to hear that there will be more, apparently. Spoilers!
Somehow I'd gotten the impression that the two leads started out as rivals or something, which is not true at all. I'd never quite read a set-up like this, though I know it's not at all uncommon in romance novels -- they're actually childhood friends (with a lot of shared trauma from their awful boarding school experience) who drifted apart while at university, and are reconnecting now that they're establishing themselves as professionals, Julian as a private detective and Ned as a metaphysician. Together they fight crime, or at least solve a mystery implicating the family of a bully from their school days.
The magic is quite neat, and unlike other systems of magic I've encountered. It's both academic and industrial: there are scientific magazines devoted to metaphysics, historical research, different schools in different countries and even slight variations between the Oxford and Cambridge traditions (which helps with the forensic magic), and it's also used in very practical and prosaic applications, keeping the family silver shining, making sure gates stay latched, that sort of thing, and metaphysicians seem to be something like white-collar craftsmen. Also, apparently there's a magical equivalent of drugs, enchantments written with special ink and consumed by drinking, which it sounds like Julian might have a bit of a problem with. Anyway, the magic is reliant on grammar, which uses symbols and tags and sounds a lot like programming, actually, and while I could not follow all the intricacies, I was amused by the various pedantic discussions (like whether or not one can use irrational numbers in magic squares) and liked the descritpion of diagnostics with this type of magic, which sounds a whole lot like troubleshooting. Oh, and I like the acknowledgement that metaphysicians specialize, and while Ned could figure out some medical magic if he had some time and a reference book, it's not something he can do on the fly. It's not a system as inherently delightful to me as elemental magic or as intuitively CORRECT as Rothfuss's applied thermodynamics, but it's a neat system to poke around in, and I look forward to learning more about it. Visiting one of the co-author's LJ, I found a lot more info about metaphysics here.
I quite like the characters. Especially Julian, the detective, who is cerebral, uninterested in sports or music but is pathological about people-watching and can't resist showing off his deductions, doesn't have much patience for people (like his long-suffering landlady) but is perfectly happy to hang around with the criminal element as long as they have interesting things to tell him, and is otherwise the type of character I tend to like -- a first in these paranormal m/m actually. I especially like what we see of young Julian in the Sts Thomas flashbacks -- that stubborn and incandescent indignation about a world that doesn't follow proper rules that felt very familiar to me from certain people I live with :P Some quotes to that effect:
"Julian had a strong sense of right and wrong, but it didn't always follow established lines."
"You said before you weren't serious."
Ned frowned at him. "i never did."
"You did," Julian said, the same despearately stubborn note rising in his voice as when he'd been expected to repeat falsehoods at school. "When we were at Oxford. You said we were too old for that sort of thing."
"I suppose I might have," Ned said, feeling suddenly a bit ashamed of himself. He hadn't thought Julian remembered that, although Julian had an unfortunate tendency one ever said.
There's enough of Sherlock Holmes in him, in the combination of brilliant and childish, that I find him an appealing and intriguing character, and actually want to read more specifically to spend time with him.
I like Ned, too, as a soothing and stabilizing influence for Julian, mostly. I mean, Ned is a really nice guy, and I like his amiable nature which charms all comers, and I especially like the way he enjoys spending time with women in general and his relationship with his secretary Miss Frost in particular. Miss Frost herself is really great, and seems to have serious potential as both a metaphysician and detective, judging by her unraveling spell and by the glee with which she takes to figuring out Mrs Nevett's source of illicit enchantments, so I'm looking forward to seeing her develop both skills further in the sequel, and just seeing more of her in general. And while I'm talking about characters, I might as well mention that I also liked Bolster, the retired cracksman who is Julian's connection to the underworld -- I'm not even sure why, but he was probably my second-favorite character overall -- and Hatton, the Scotland Yard inspector who, it looks like, will be even more of a staple in book 2.
This is also one of the first m/m stories where I see why the principals are together, other than just "because they're the leads" or (not to be dismissed in a Victorian setting where homosexuality is a crime) "because they're both gay and have managed to figure this out about each other". Ned and Julian have a long, long history together, going back to when they were twelve and Ned was Julian's only friend, and there's enough complications to their history that the two of them getting together feels both right and not inevitable. I'm not a huge fan of romantic misunderstandings, but I could definitely believe Ned being hurt by Julian seeming to throw him over in favor of his clever new university friends who made fun of Ned ("I shouldn't have let them do that [...] I suppose it was just that they were very clever."), back in Oxford, and thus feeling like he doesn't mean much to Julian, and could also buy Julian being convinced that Ned was simply biding time until he had enough money to marry, and so wasn't a serious prospect. And even if they hadn't been believable, at least these were more interesting reasons to doubt their compatibility / possibility for a serious relationship than I've encountered before.
Oh, and their accidental pet carnivorous plant which they feed ham rinds over breakfast and which nipped Ned's ear while they were making out on Julian's couch is oddly adorable.
The book is a mystery, so I should definitely talk about plot. I've left it for last (or almost last) because it felt weaker to me than the worldbuilding or characters. Too many loose ends (for example, there was another couple at dinner the night Edgar Nevett was murdered, and nobody even talks to them, or thinks about them at all; I kept expecting them to turn out to have some significance, but they didn't), too many times where Ned and Julian said "well, it can't be them or them or them" while neglecting to disposition another character (e.g. they decide that Victor must be protecting his mother or his brothers with his false confession, but it's not clear to me why at that point they did not consider that he could be protecting his wife; she has no clear motive, and later cooperates with their investigation so after a while I was ready to believe that it wasn't her, but they have no reason to dismiss her from consideration right then...) I figured out that Makins had been hired to burgle Nevett and killed off afterwards so he couldn't talk about it well before the protagonists did. I also kept expecting SOMETHING dramatic to happen with Ellis when they go to confront the murderer, but nothing did -- he told them he wouldn't confess or kill himself to protect the family, they told him fine, they'd go to the police, and they did, and he was arrested and convicted. This made the book feel weirdly without a climax; or, rather, the action climax seems to be the rescue of Annie Makins (which I did like, especially Julian suggesting starting a fire at the gas-works and Ned prudently amending that to an ILLUSION of fire, which works exactly as planned), and not the actual resolution of the mystery itself.
Sts Thomas, the boarding school from which Julian and Ned know each other is a huge part of this book, both the background for both men and their connection to the family affected by the murder. I'm not sure how plausible all this is -- the school seemed like such an improbably awful place, but then I also think that about many people's accounts of their middle/high school experience in the real world... But I did like that Julian had never forgiven Victor and had to be talked into not letting him hang for a false confession, and that with the aid of the same logic Ned had used on him to talk him out of putting arsenic in the prefects' tea when they were thriteen: you will always know you could have done it. And that Ned felt that he should have moved on and left behind his feelings about Victor (who whipped him bloody in school) and is angry at himself, feels himself to be weak and foolish, for not being able to do so. I also liked the way Victor ended up being shown -- as someone who *is* a bully, arrogant and not very clever, but who does have positive qualities -- the way he was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of his brother, though he may not have fully believed what he was signing up for with the confession -- and the way the three brothers talk about each other.
A couple of quotes:
"Julian had found friends of his own there for the first time, dramatic young men who were scathingly clever and made bantering references to poetry Ned hadn't read and wore green carnations, or at least talked about wearing them."
"We generally try to do without the assistance of private detectives at the Yard," Hatton said. "it's felt that's what they pay us for."
*
Assorted dispatches:
SKZB reports he is halfway done with the draft of Vallista, and expects to be finished with the draft in about 3 months. So Vallista is looking like a late-2017 book. *waits impatiently*
O finished Etiquette and Espionage, the first Sophronia book, and we talked about it for his reading log. He said he liked Sophronia a lot, because she's "stubborn and sneaky" (heh, I know another one like that), and wants to read the sequels. And L is starting to read Fangirl, less because I recommended it to her and more because a friend in school did (said friend is reading Carry On right now and not liking it as much); we'll see what she thinks of it, but for now she's annoyed at the off-brand Harry Potter-ness of Simon Snow :P
On a similar but more significant note, we also showed Monty Python's Life of Brian to the rodents (for the first time) tonight. A bunch of it was clearly over O's head, though less over L's, but they both laughed a ton, especially at the stoning and everything with Biggus Dickus (but B was laughing even harder). I was especially happy that L at least seemed to appreciate my favorite bit, which is the "Romans go home" grammar lesson. (ETA: LOL, it just occurred to me that this is an interesting choice of movie for 'erev Easter' XD That had definitely not been planned -- we'd been talking about watching it for a couple of weeks -- but kind of amusing the way it worked out nevertheless...)