I wanted to be charmed by this book. At times I was, mostly by the clockwork octopus, Katsu. But then every once in a while the author would make a choice and I would sit and shake my head. Or something would be revealed and I would be irritated that it had waited until now. I know this all sounds very vague, but that's pretty much because I have a sense of light dissatisfaction that is not really dislike, more like disappointment. It feels like this is two-thirds of the way to being a very good book indeed, but some of the authorial choices were not for me.
Mostly this is around the queer content. I am very happy there is queer content. I'm not as happy that it's so subtle that I didn't notice it until we were at about the 3/4 mark of the book. This is perhaps more irksome because that makes this the second book I've read that is supposed to be about gay male desire in Victorian London (the other was a vampire novel) and really dropped the ball because the author made it so little of the story. I mean, it's fine if characters are gay, and that's who they are and it's not a huge part of the story, but when the story ends up hinging on one man's feelings for another, and I didn't even notice they were brewing, well, either I was being terminally dense while reading this book, or it wasn't given enough weight before it all came out in the open.
I suppose I should go back to the plot, to put this in context. Thaniel (short for Nathaniel, and I've never heard that short-form before, and I've transcribed god-only-knows how many names on membership lists of clubs in the late 19th century) works for the government in England, eventually for the Foreign Office. A bomb set off by Fenians nearly kills him, except that he was warned by an alarm on a pocketwatch that turned up in his home previously. This leads him to the watch's maker, Mori, a Japanese man who can see all the possibilities of the future, and chooses to sometimes nudge them to more palatable ends.
And even though Thaniel moves in with him, it took me forever to figure out that they had feelings for each other. I don't need swooning, but it's okay if gay desire has a physical component, you know? It doesn't need to be all refined all the time - the Victorians, trust me, had sex. They felt desire. The prose here does not need to be overwrought, but it would be nice if it were present.
Thaniel decides to get married to a science-minded woman who needs a husband in order to claim an inheritance. They like each other well enough, but they certainly aren't in love. And while Grace is an interesting character, I didn't love the decision to make her into the villain. She decides that if Thaniel is with or near Mori, he'll become nothing more than Mori's puppet, and so she decides to cause an explosion to discredit Mori. This is after previously destroying the gift Mori sent for a housewarming, for no particular reason other than to be petty and to want to own Thaniel.
This would make more sense if she was more intensely in love with him, or maybe if she'd been developed more strongly as seeing people as little more than objects to acquire. It's not that anything here is wrong, exactly, but she's really the only developed female character, and so to make her the embodiment of female jealousy over a man she doesn't love, hurting and potentially killing people to get what she wants...I don't love it as a choice. If there were more female characters, I'd have less of an issue.
So...this is okay. There were bits I liked quite a lot, but the book seemed afraid of its subject matter, and instead of character traits being skilfully laid in, they were more jammed in when it became dramatically necessary. It's unfortunate, because there is a lot here to like.
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