The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, pt.1: Sarah Tolmie

 

The Pleasures of 2021

by Sarah Tolmie

 While many people filled in the COVID time that hung heavy on their hands over the past nearly-two years with reading, I can’t say that I did. Teaching online takes up a surprising amount of time — startup costs are high — and I spent a lot of the rest of the time writing. Some was new writing, and some was shunting existing fiction into other forms: chiefly converting my first short fiction collection from 2014, NoFood, and then my most recent novella (out with tor.com in March) All the Horses of Iceland, into screenplays. Perhaps unavailingly. Time will tell. However, through all of this period I have continued my newfound fascination with audiobooks. Peri-menopausal insomnia may have a lot to do with this, I admit. So I worked my way through yet more Dickens, discovered Tony Walker’s excellent Classic Ghost Stories channel and listened to Greg Wagland of Magpie Audio deliver Conan Doyle stories of highly varying quality with great aplomb. But my greatest discovery was Natasha Pulley. 

 Audiobooks tend to lag behind fiction publishing by a year or two, so I realize that her works can’t be breaking news to any readers interested in steampunk. But The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow and subsequently The Bedlam Stacks were quite the revelation to me. I have listened to them all several times through, getting all the details straight (much harder listening to an audiobook, whereas I remember details that I read in print instantly … acknowledging this fact has served me in good stead trying to write screenplays). Anyway, her books are lovely. They are vividly written, well-researched in terms of their period details, and in the case of the Filigree Street/Pepperharrow books in particular, they come at the history of science (in this case the development of the electron microscope) from a steep and richly imaginative angle. From the plotting point of view, in these two books, she does great things with the bog-standard Gothic motif of clairvoyance. This is a motif, like time-travel, that is now so ubiquitous and is so often used as a cheesy temporal band-aid, that it was a relief to see it restored to something like the dangerous burden that nineteenth-century fiction made it out to be (say, as in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, for example). 

Pulley also displays a consistent interest, both painterly and speculative, in the idea of the air around us as a kind of canvas or recording medium, capable of capturing the wake of our past motion and even of predicting it, revealing transient ghosts of our future action. In The Bedlam Stacks people’s pathways can be discerned for minutes after their passage through mists of bio-luminescent pollen, where in an extended experiment is conducted to charge the ether — as it was understood by 19th-century science — with electricity such that people’s intention pathways are manifested visibly in the air. Again, here is a really intelligent and captivating use of the hoary old trope of electricity as it appears everywhere in Gothic lit after Frankenstein. Pulley engages with Victorian scientific theory and uses it practically: electrical impulses in the brain as it makes decisions are writ large in the world when the surrounding ether is amplified into a charged field. She has a similarly detailed and period-plausible explanation for clairvoyance: a clairvoyant is essentially a kind of seismograph in miniature, able to detect electrical activity in people’s brains and to extrapolate their etheric decision pathways. This is exactly the kind of speculation that Victorians engaged in; it’s why her story works so well. 

 One thing occurred to me after hearing The Bedlam Stacks that had not precisely come to the fore in hearing the two books about Mori and Steepleton (Filgree/Pepperharrow). I think it required a repetition of the pattern to see it clearly: that is, of the central characters in both cases being gay men, explicitly so in the case of Mori and Steepleton, and more homosocially so in the case of the protagonists of The Bedlam Stacks. Female characters are peripheral and not congenial: the key women in both the Mori/Steepleton books make spectacular misreadings of the sympathetic male characters, leading them both into penitential plot lines. Mothers are absent or evil. Marriage is pictured solely as a stifling and sexist instrument of convenience. There is also a considerable age gap between the male lovers in both cases: Mori, who is in his forties, is paired with Steepleton, twenty years his junior, and Merrick, the protagonist of Bedlam, falls in love with an ageless man who was once in love with his own grandfather. Put this all together with the fact that Pulley lived in Japan for some time and took the trouble to learn Japanese, and I think we must be seeing the influence of that complex range of genres that gets grouped under BL or shōnen-ai or Yaoi. I know very little about these genres except that they are overwhelmingly written and read by women. My teenage kids know a lot more. 

What I saw in Pulley’s works initially were the influences of European literature. But after some reflection, I can at least intuit that these Japanese ones are also in play. This makes her books in English more, not less, interesting to me. For one thing, it complicates their space within feminism. Steampunk works emerge out of a fascination with the early industrial European world and its attendant deep and abiding sexism. Therefore it has often been a fictional space for plucky heroines who struggle against these odds: Philip Pullman’s whole oeuvre is a case in point. In Pulley’s steampunk vision there are two potential plucky heroines — Grace and Pepper — who are determinedly sidelined all the way through. One is a scientist, one a female kabuki artist. Both have radical potential, and both are nothing but destroyed and cut down. They achieve limited career success but zero in the erotic fulfillment line. Pepper ends up a diva suicide. It’s horrific. All in all, Pulley’s is a man’s world. This is the world that is reflected in all 19th-century European fiction, the fiction that fundamentally underlies today’s steampunk. It may be that Pulley’s Japanese inflection of this world once again reveals its core.

Keep on masking and vaxxing, and good luck to us all for 2022! 

 

 Sarah Tolmie has published four books with Aqueduct: Disease (2020), The Little Animals (2019, winner of the Special Citation at the Philip K Dick Awards), Two Travelers (2016) and The Stone Boatmen (shortlisted for the 2015 IAFA Crawford Award). Her novella The Fourth Island came out with Tor.com in fall 2020 and another novella, All The Horses of Iceland, came out earlier this year. She has published three books of poetry with McGill-Queen’s University Press: Check, released in November 2020, The Art of Dying (finalist for the Griffin Prize in 2019) and Trio (finalist for the 2015 Pat Lowther Award from the League of Canadian Poets). Her elegy “Ursula Le Guin in the Underworld” won the 2019 Rhysling Award, Long Poem and the 2019 Aurora Award for Poem/Song.  She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Waterloo.