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The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
By Natasha Pulley
These discussion questions are designed to enhance your group’s conversation about The
Watchmaker of Filigree Street, a novel about Thaniel Steepleton, a young clerk, and Keita Mori,
a watchmaker who remembers the future, during the time of Irish nationalist movements and
Japanese civil war.
About this book
In Victorian England during the time of the Irish nationalist movement, Thaniel Steepleton is
working as a Whitehall clerk in the Home Office when a strange and intricate pocket watch
appears in his flat without a note. However, amidst bomb threat against Whitehall by Clan na
Gael, a violent Irish nationalist group, Thaniel’s watch seems like the least of his worries. That
is, until it saves his life.
Following the bombing, Thaniel seeks out the watch’s maker, Keita Mori. They soon strike up an
intimate friendship, despite the possibility that Mori may have been the bomb maker. At the
same time, physicist Grace Carrow is battling her way through Oxford University, seeking to
prove the existence of ether despite the jeers and doubts of its male students. When Thaniel and
Grace’s paths overlap, they agree to help each other in order to help themselves; soon, however,
Mori’s perceptive, almost prophetic observations lead Grace to suspect something even more
sinister. With Grace and Mori pulling at him from opposite sides, and with England as he knows
it seeming to fall apart around him, Thaniel is forced to choose where his loyalty and love really
lie.
For discussion (14–16)
1. The novel switches between years and moments in history from London in the 1880s to
Japan in the 1870s. What effect does this shift in location and time have on the reader?
To what extent does it produce a globalist vision of history?
2. Nationalism takes several forms in this novel, yet these forms are similar in many ways.
Consider the different instances of nationalism, particularly those of the Irish and of the
Japanese. How do these views differ? Does the novel offer sympathy or skepticism for
their projects?
3. “All the same, [Thaniel] had a feeling that life should not have been about ten candles
and two baths a week.” Discuss Thaniel’s life before and after his meeting with Mori.
What has changed, if anything? Argue either for or against Thaniel’s transformation and
development as a character with this passage and its articulation of Thaniel’s somber
prospects in mind.
4. “The gold [of the watch] caught the ember-light and shone the colour of a human voice”:
Synesthesia is a condition whereby stimulation of one sensory pathway results in
stimulation of another unrelated pathway. Thaniel frequently exhibits characteristics of a
synesthete. In what ways do such characteristics provide context for Thaniel’s fraught
relationship with music, and what do they say about Thaniel himself as a character?
5. Consider Grace’s character. What role do women play in the university, and specifically
within scientific realms? Would you define her as a feminist? If so, define this kind of
feminism and consider how it differs from that of Bertha and the other suffragettes.
6. At the meeting of the suffragettes at the women’s college, Bertha treats Matsumoto with
disdain and unconcealed racism. Consider the various prejudices in this novel,
particularly those of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. How does this novel
present these prejudices in a historical setting, and how does its departure from these
prejudices surprise the reader?
7. How are the characters of the novel both involved in and yet removed from the national
politics of England, Ireland, and Japan? What is the nature of their distance from such
politics? How are human relationships and national political issues prioritized in the text?
8. “Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said ‘do
not walk on the grass’, one hopped. Anybody who didn’t had failed to understand what
Oxford was.” In what ways is the university oppressive and conservative, and in what
ways, if any, is it a site of innovation? Discuss the role of the university in this novel, and
compare it with the modern notion of the university.
9. “‘Your science can save a man’s life, but imagination makes it worth living.’” Discuss
this quotation from Matsumoto with regards to the three main characters: Thaniel, Mori,
and Grace. In what ways are they imaginative or scientific? Are these characteristics
mutually exclusive, or do they overlap and suggest another way of making life “worth
living”?
10. Consider Mori’s ability to remember and therefore predict the future, yet his inability to
foresee matters of chance, such as the fall of a coin. Is there an inherent tension in this
novel between fate and chance? What purpose do such limitations on Mori’s ability serve
in the context of the novel?
11. Friendships take many forms in this novel, from work interactions to platonic friendships
to romantic relationships. How do these different forms of relationships influence the
plot, and what does that suggest about the value and importance of them in human life?
12. Grace accuses Thaniel of falling prey to Mori’s machinations of their lives in saying,
“‘You are such good clockwork that you don’t know.’” Given this quotation, in what
ways is Thaniel a follower? Does he in fact break the rules as much as follow them? How
does the identity of an outsider differ from the identity of a follower, or “good
clockwork”?
13. Consider Grace’s distrust of Mori that escalates in her desire to frame Yuki as the Clan na
Gael bomber, simply to remove Mori from her life as well as Thaniel’s. Is this action
selfish, heroic, or something else altogether? Does it revise your opinion of Grace, either
for the better or for the worse? Why?
14. Does the relationship between Mori and Grace resolve? In what ways is it left ambiguous
or decided? What do you envision for their futures, and where will Thaniel fit in each
future?
Suggested reading
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own;
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries; David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet;
Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale; Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet; Thomas Hardy, Jude
the Obscure; Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus; Robin Hobb, Fool’s Errand; Neil Gaiman,
Neverwhere; Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country.
Natasha Pulley studied English Literature at Oxford University. After stints working at
Waterstones as a bookseller, then at Cambridge University Press as a publishing assistant in the
astronomy and maths departments, she did the Creative Writing MA at UEA. She has recently
returned from Tokyo, where she lived for nineteen months on a scholarship from the Daiwa
Anglo-Japanese Foundation. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is her first novel.