The Women of Natasha Pulley: Takiko Pepperharrow

This is part two of a series. Read part one here.

There is nothing in the universe more tiresome to me than the bit in a Doctor Who episode where someone, usually a woman, stops everything to monologue about the Doctor. How brilliant he is, how unfathomable, how glad we all are that our lives revolve utterly around him. Call him special, fine; relentlessly wax poetic about the singularity of his unimpeachable greatness, boring; make this one man so divine that every horrible thing he does looks just and reasonable, depressing. Someone’s got to draw a line somewhere, surely. What does that story look like?

A Natasha Pulley book, apparently. Keita Mori, the otherworldly clairvoyant of Pulley’s Watchmaker novels, is exactly the kind of man these monologues were made for—and yet on almost every occasion he is met not with praise and wonder but dire warnings and well-earned dread. Ordinary people may find themselves trapped in his orbit but they’re rarely happy about it, and women especially are unimpressed and unforgiving. The Lost Future of Pepperharrow puts a spotlight on one such woman, Takiko Pepperharrow herself, whose years-long campaign against Mori ends abruptly when she changes her mind and sacrifices everything for him. In the second part of this series on Natasha Pulley’s women, I’ll be looking at how Takiko falls victim to a narrative that ultimately favours the greater needs of a greater man. (Spoilers for The Lost Future of Pepperharrow.)

The Women of Natasha Pulley: Grace Carrow

When I was 15 I decided to love Sansa Stark with my whole heart. I knew teenage girlhood was tough enough without getting cutthroat politics involved, and frankly the more people hated her the more passionate I became in her defence. My love for unpopular and just plain unlikeable women has since become something of a knee-jerk reaction, but blind though my love may be it doesn’t keep me from looking hard at the biases that punish these women in the first place.

Natasha Pulley’s novels—The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow and The Bedlam Stacks—are some of my favourite discoveries of 2020, with beautiful writing, intricate plots, brilliant characters and fascinating history. They’re also really weird about women. The precious few who manage to squeeze themselves onto the page feel more like props than people, and look all the more pitiful in the richly drawn shadows of the men around them. I don’t know Pulley and I’m not interested in speculating about where her particular biases may come from, but I do think it’s important to recognise and critique them—so important, in fact, that I’m writing three whole essays about it. In this first instalment, I’m looking at Grace Carrow, the sole and detestable heroine of Pulley’s debut The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. (Spoilers for The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow ahead.)

On rebuilding the fourth wall

T.H White’s The Once and Future King has been sat on my bedside table for a not insignificant while now, but slow progress is still progress. I started book three, the Lancelot-centric The Ill-Made Knight, on my Thursday morning commute, and promptly put it down again because the first two paragraphs made me fully catatonic. To whit:

The boy thought that there was something wrong with him. All through his life—even when he was a great man with the world at his feet—he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret.

The Ill-Made Knight, ch. 1

Nothing Much to Do: the perfect Shakespeare webseries

Every year for the last three years, I have been lucky enough to see a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Considering it was my first Shakespeare and still a hot favourite this has been something of a dream run for me, but when it eventually runs dry I take great comfort in the fact that my favourite adaptation will always be right there on YouTube. Not Kenneth Branagh’s, not even David Tennant and Catherine Tate’s, though both are excellent. I’m talking about Nothing Much To Do, the 2014 web series by Kiwi creators The Candle Wasters that sees Shakespearean drama transplanted into an Auckland highschool with almost frightening accuracy.

The Keys to the Kingdom: epic worldbuilding made simple

Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdomseries is (maybe) getting some kind of film adaptation, and I think it’s fair to say that 21-year-old me is even more excited about that than eight-year-old me would have been. The story of a weedy asthmatic kid reluctantly becoming God—no, seriously—is a childhood favourite that has stood the test of time with intricate, original worldbuilding and an epic narrative to boot. And while some of the details may seem like an absolute nightmare to adapt, Nix’s bizarre fantasy is propped up by a surprisingly simple structure that balances standard narrative beats with creativity and surprise. So how does all that work, exactly? No spoilers, but plenty of proper nouns ahead.

Queen's Thief: the next Game of Thrones?

I’m not a huge fan of media that advertises itself as ‘the next [insert major pop culture phenomenon here]’. Yes, trends exist, and recommendations are helpful, but part of what made [insert major pop culture phenomenon here] so great the first time around was that it wasn’t trying to be a pop culture phenomenon. It was different, and fresh, and engaging—not a copycat of something cool. For me, these labels tend to signpost some flavour of disappointing derivation; they work best when taken with thorough personal research and at least a couple grains of salt.

That said, I often consider pitching Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief as the next Game of Thrones, if only to make people read it and argue with me afterwards about how accurate or misleading that declaration is.

Wholesome grimdark and The Vagrant Trilogy

I don’t really get grimdark fantasy. Cold heroes, hopeless worlds, cynicism as a shorthand for meaning and optimism for foolishness—it depresses and bores me to death. I’m much more of a Tolkien gal myself. The two philosophies could not be more different, blood and guts on the one hand and stupidly joyful eucatastrophe on the other—yet somehow, Peter Newman’s debut Vagrant Trilogy manages to straddle both to become one of my favourite series of all time.

But how? Is it possible? Is it even good? Oh, I am so very glad you asked. I kind of hate to get into it because it was such a delight to read with no expectations, but I’ve also wanted to talk about this for a while so I’ve kept it as spoiler-free as possible. You’re welcome.

I always get back up: fear and pain in superhero movies

Back in January, when the temperatures ran at a horrifying 40 degrees for several days in a row, I took myself off to go see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Then I came home and watched Deadpool 2, and then the next day I watched Logan. These movies have more in common than you’d think: I liked them all, they all made me cry at least a little bit, and they all made me think about the ways in which fear and pain are represented in superhero movies. Was I delirious from heat and the crippling existential terror of climate change when I connected these particular dots? A little. But they’re fun dots, so humour me. Spoilers ahead for Into the Spider-Verse, Deadpool 2, Logan and even Infinity War, but definitely not Endgame, so isn’t that refreshing?

Stardust, Stardust, and the different types of fairytale

One day, my quest will be complete. After years of searching and wanting and hoping, one day I will finally hold Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s original illustrated Stardust in my hands, and thus will I become the proud owner of every piece of Stardust media out there, and I will be unstoppable. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Which is all well and good, but really the most important piece in this spectacular collection (1999 novel, 2007 movie, 2017 BBC radio play) is the movie, because it alone is an adaptation—that is, something that has changed to suit a new environment. The radio play hews pretty close to the source material and the illustrated edition is just that: pictures attached to an existing text. But though the film tells the same story—small town boy travels through Faerie to retrieve a fallen star—all the usual shifts from page to screen have made it a very different kind of story, and specifically a different kind of fairytale.