PERFECTLY
TIMED CHAOS
070 | W W W. S C I FI N OW.CO.U K
BOOK CLUB
InterviewYour debut The Watchmaker of
Filigree Street received critical acclaim,
how did it feel to hear such great
things about your novel?
Terrifying! But also great. I now have an ego
the size of Mount Everest.
What is it like coming back to the
characters and world for its sequel
The Lost Future Of Pepperharrow?
Quite difficult at first. I started writing
Watchmaker when I was 21, and the
characters reflected my age. When I came
back to them years later, it felt like trying to
go back in time, which was uncomfortable,
because I don’t actually like past-me very
much. It took a long time (and several drafts)
to make those characters mine again.
Had you already planned where the
story would go next?
Inefficiently, no. I know some writers who
plan things wonderfully, with cork boards
that have strings and graphs on them, but I
just sat down for this one and went ‘right,
something weird with electricity, I reckon’.
This is not how you should write a novel,
by the way. It becomes very stressful.
The Lost Future Of Pepperharrow is a
fantastic mix of steampunk, historical
fantasy, romance, ghost stories and
politics. What are your influences and
how did you first imagine this world?
I used to live in Tokyo, so that helps a lot;
modern Tokyo is very different to Meiji
Tokyo of course, but basic things are the
same. Some of the old train stations are
still there, the geography, all that. Just like
modern English, modern Japanese is full of
19th Century ghosts. The way employees
speak to the bosses at large corporations is
very similar to the way that junior samurai
would have spoken to their lords; that
incredibly strict social hierarchy is alive and
well even now, not least because today’s big
corporations in Tokyo were often founded
by major samurai houses. Visit, and you see
snatches of that older Japan every day.
Japanese ghost stories are brilliant too.
If you’ve never tried any before, a lovely
collection to start with is Akinari’s Ueda’s
plot will feel hollow. For me, the most
important thing to know in developing a
character is what makes them laugh. If you
can pin down someone’s sense of humour,
it often tells you far more about them than
other traits. For example, someone who loves
to play around with words – the kind of
character who’d giggle at ‘the very pineapple
of perfection!’ – is often going to be different
to someone who loves practical jokes.The intricate plot to The Lost Future
Of Pepperharrow has many moving
parts – how did you go about
planning the story?
I didn’t plan it, it’s all chaotic, and the point
at which my editor published it was when it
just about made sense.What other authors/novels are you
reading right now and who/what are
you excited about?
I’ve been on a Russian theme lately! I love
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and I’m reading The
First Circle right now, which is fantastic,
alongside Mother by Maksim Gorky, which
is awful but informative. Mikhail Bulgakov’s
A Young Doctor’s Notebook is probably the
funniest book I’ve read this year.
I also love Laura Purcell – Queen of the
Gothic – and I’ll always be first in the queue
for anything by Robert Harris. I’m very
excited indeed about Catriona Ward’s new
book, which will be published by Serpent’s
Tail next year, and also Stuart Turton’s next,
which I hear is about a shipwreck where
things have gone strangely wrong...What is next for you?
It’s a book called The Kingdoms. It’s an
alternate history about what might have
happened if the English had lost the Battle
of Trafalgar. It’s set in 1901, and London
is a French colony, slavery is very much in
force, and a strange epidemic of what doctors
think is epilepsy is giving people visions of
relatives who don’t exist and places they’ve
never been to.The Lost Future Of Pepperharrow
is published by Bloomsbury
Publishing on 5 March.18th Century collection, Tales Of Moonlight
And Rain; there are scary stories and wistful
ones, but they’re all beautiful. I also love The
Tale Of Genji, which is an enormous, ancient
novel by Lady Murasaki, full of wild places
and ghostly women. It’s like a big treasure
hoard of the best things about Japan.
I think Meiji politics are fascinating,
too. This is an era when castles are being
demolished by government mandate, senior
politicians are being assassinated, and
what used to be an uninfluential country is
suddenly becoming a world power.The novel juxtaposes Victorian
England with Meiji era Japan – how
integral is setting and time era for
you in your novels?
It’s everything and nothing. Characters have
to be of their time and country, so those
things are important, and they define a lot
about the books; but I do also believe (and
this is after living in Japan, China, and Peru)
that humans are basically human, wherever
or whenever they’re from.The Lost Future Of Pepperharrow
incorporates complex politics. Why
did you decide to add this, and how
important is to you for this medium to
hold a mirror to world politics?
A mirror implies that world politics might
look back, and I really don’t think I’m
influential enough for that. But what I did
want to do was show 19th Century Tokyo
with real complexity, because it’s easy
to flatten out historical fiction. There’s a
horrible temptation to assume that historical
Japan is all cherry blossom and samurai, and
I wanted to push against that. Meiji Tokyo
was an unexpected, fantastic, dangerous
place, and even though writing it that way
meant dumping a lot of politics into the
book, I hope readers will understand why.Your novels have very complicated
characters. What is your character
development process and how
integral is having complex characters?
Any novel needs complex characters.
Without that, even a beautifully written story
with amazing landscapes and a wonderfulWe speak to author Natasha Pulley about The Lost Future Of Pepperharrow,
the sequel to her debut novel The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
WORDS RACHAEL HARPER