The Bedlam Stacks

Ms. Pulley's first book, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, is a wonderful book, with strange and familiar and strangely familiar characters and a great deal of subtle wonder all around. The characters all grow toward and away from each other. The Victorian setting is very well done, with the Japanese exhibition opening up that straightened London.

The Beldam Stacks is even more wonderful. As a reader I had such ambivalence about the European characters, sometimes endearing, sometimes crass, sometimes near transcendent. But the place, the stacks, that realistic magic just floored me. I dreamed phantastic dreams while reading this, architectural and biological and glowing.

The central mystery reminded me of "The Stress of Her Regard" by Tim Powers, but The Stacks though serving up constant danger are less fraught and far more exotic than nephilim haunted Europe.

I love books like this. I call them "rabbit hole" books because I just fall right down them, never once considering how to get out. And life after waking up is a little tattier around the edges.

The incredible writing . . .I read the Kindle sample and immediately bought the book. Fascinating plot; what I think I liked the best was the psychological intricacies. The touches of magical realism ran glimmering through the book like fine gold embroidery. Just~beautiful. If you haven’t read it yet, I envy you. About to go load up on everything else Natasha Pulley’s written, and preorder her new one coming out early next year.

I fell in love with Natasha Pulley's first book, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, and was so excited when I saw she had this second book out. And I loved this one just as much as the first!

The book made me think of the sort of adventure stories written by John Buchan, or H. Rider Haggard's stories about Allan Quartermain (for younger readers of this review who may not recognize those names...think Indiana Jones)...stories of adventure and exploration but written with an earlier-than-21st-century sensibility. A lot of the reviews here mention that the book is slow...I would say more that it is a deliberate build-up. There are hints of strange very early on, before the main characters adventures even start, and those hints build and build. The supernatural here is almost explainable...could almost be something that would occur in our own world.

But it's the characters that I love especially, wounded (mentally and physically) Merrick and Raphael of course, Clement, even the people of the stacks - Inti, Aquila. And the marvelous reappearance of a character from Watchmaker. They are so real and their relationships so well drawn. And the world they inhabit is beautifully described. I'd love to see the stacks, with their obsidian inclusions...I'd love to write messages in the glowing pollen...

I'll just have to wait for Ms. Pulley's next book, I guess.

Natasha Pulley's writing is pure magic. As someone who doesn't tend to gravitate towards historical fiction, I will always reach for either of Pulley's books. I was a giant fan of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Bedlam Stacks just solidified how much I adore her writing. 

The novel starts off a bit slow, but Pulley's writing is elegant and quickly snagged me in once our main character, Merrick Tremayne, finds himself embarking on an expedition to Peru, specifically a mountain town that's known well by his grandfather and father, in order to smuggler cuttings of cinchona trees to treat malaria in India. The magical realism of the beliefs of this village mixes amazingly well with the beautiful imagery of native Peru as I found myself straddling the line along with Merrick of what could possibly be true. Each page was a thrill to turn and I found myself so excited to find out what was going to happen next. 

The Bedlam Stacks is a beautiful story of friendship and cultural intrigue. It may require some patience, but I swear to you, it's worth it. 

I'm interested in Peru and the Incas, so I was psyched to find this book. Unfortunately it did not live up to my expectations. It's a great story, poorly told. The protagonist never came to life for me. I suppose he was the quintessential detached, unemotional British colonial functionary. From one paragraph to the next, strange things happen but the pacing is so poor that I'm never sure what's actually going on. Mostly they make tea and coffee and walk around from here to there. I kept waiting for the secret to be revealed...a hidden Inca stronghold with high tech and magic? A gigantic scissors for editing would have helped this book, as well as a magnifying glass to examine each paragraph and see whether it added to story flow or was just padding. We also have Raphael, a Quechua Indian, who can nevertheless converse about Shakespeare and speak perfect colloquial English. Here was a character with major fascination...which again, never came through. His motivation remained murky. In both this book and Pulley's other one, there is a deep and almost romantic attachment between two male characters. What?

Wow, this is one of the worst books I've read in a long time. The writing is just plain bad. I enjoy dense, writerly prose but this is so clunky and over-wrought. It's impossible to follow the action or descriptions. The characters all speak in ways no human ever does, and all the dialog from every single character is exactly the same as the narrator. The characters all speak past each other in weird and annoying ways. It's less dialog and more one person's inner monologue. None of the characters have any personality. They all change their personality traits from scene to scene, sometimes line to line.

For historical fiction, there is no sense of time and place. Almost nothing in the way the characters think and talk reflects the 1850s (except the racism). There are so many blatant, obvious anachronisms in word choice I had to think it was deliberate but why even bother writing historical fiction if you're not going to commit to the era you choose?

And the racism is really inexcusable. The main character makes racist comments about all the natives he meets, which I suppose makes sense for a British Imperialist in the 1850s-60s but the problem is he never gets past it, and the plot only reinforces his point of view. One sentence at the end saying "we're all equally terrible" does not undo the larger imperialist and white savior narrative. If the author wants to tell a story of a wholly made up magical place, why not invent a fictional world? Using Peru as the setting is no more than cultural appropriation. A story about a white imperialist learning from magical natives is racist. The plot is motivated by imperialism--stealing the resources of Peru (quinine) so that England can more efficiently colonize India (by curing malaria among the colonizers). And we're supposed to root for that to succeed? And it's all undergirded by the white savior narrative--Merrick is the only one who recognizes the true value of the village and takes the correct steps to preserve it, unlike the incompetent, corrupt, misguided or helpless natives.

The final straw for me was the way not only Raphael but also Keita are magical natives who fall in love with Merrick. Why? He's the most boring non-entity. But he is white. It truly is the white man's burden.