The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, Natasha Pullman

We first meet Nathaniel Steepleton, a telegraphist, and Keita Mori, a Japanese watchmaker, in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.  This is Natasha Pullman’s first novel, set in nineteenth-century London.  Mori, it turns out, can see the future, and this talent allows him to come up with intricate, not to say byzantine, plots to turn things to his advantage.

Pullman has clearly thought about what it means to have a talent like this.  For one thing, Mori doesn’t need to learn a language, because his future self already speaks it, and he can tap into that future fluency.  But when he stops speaking that language -- when there's no future for him to tap into -- he loses all knowledge of it, and he falls silent in the middle of a conversation.

She’s also thought about what effect someone like Mori would have on others.  Would a good outcome for him mean a bad outcome for someone else?  What if you don’t trust him to do the right thing?  And if he knows the future, how can you plot against him?

A lot of people fell upon this book with great cries of gladness -- and I liked it too, but it didn’t seem all that astonishing.  I found myself liking The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, the second book featuring Nathaniel and Mori, more.  Maybe it’s because the two men end up in nineteenth-century Japan this time, a fascinating setting filled with customs and history and facts about language I never knew.  Nathaniel goes there because he’s now fluent in Japanese and works as a translator, and the British legation in Japan seems to have a problem with ghosts. Mori is there because the Japanese need a clairvoyant to experiment on, and they've made threats about what they'll do if he refuses.  (They’re aware, of course, that he could probably work around them in some way, and that he has really come because he wants to, which worries them.)  Or maybe I enjoyed Pepperharrow more because it deals with more characters, and has a larger canvas.  Or because Mori’s plan, this time, is even more complicated: he starts by seeming to betray Japan to the Russians, allows himself to be experimented on, arranges for his wife * to work in a prison camp, and ends up in the middle of a battle at the British legation.  It’s so complicated, in fact, that even Mori forgets where it was going.

As someone (I think it was philrm) pointed out, women in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street ended up getting pretty short shrift, especially a woman named Grace Carrow, who was supposed to marry Nathaniel.  Carrow does better in the new book, first becoming lecturer in ether theory at Tokyo University and then working on a top-secret scientific project.  (Physics in this universe can only be understood by studying the ether, but, not having taken Carrow’s class, I can’t explain it any more than that.)  Unfortunately Carrow’s good fortune has to be balanced against the fact that two other women, in two separate incidents, think nothing of dying for Mori.  One of those deaths makes sense -- the woman has a terminal illness -- but the other one seems to come out of nowhere.

That’s disturbing by any measure.  It’s a sign of how good this book is that I enjoyed it despite these deaths.  But if Pullman writes more books about Mori and Nathaniel -- and I hope she does -- I’d really appreciate it if the women in them didn’t run to sacrifice themselves.  Or if a character has to be sacrificed, how about someone other than a woman this time?

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* No, we didn’t know Mori was married.  More importantly, neither did Nathaniel.