Women are the properties of their fathers or husbands and those of Asian heritage keep to themselves. Into this space, Natasha Pulley, in her first novel, places three major and some colourful minor characters and sets them in unfolding relationships.
Thaniel Steepleton, a telegraph operator at the Home Office, a man who sees colours in sounds and plays the piano, and has an orderly and predictable life, finds a watch with mysterious ''powers'' in his room.
He is surprised when the pawnbroker won't accept it, as he has experience with such watches before, and finds they go missing soon after they are bought.
Grace Carrow, a theoretical physicist who has to dress in her male friend's clothes to use a university library, experiments to find proof of the existence of luminiferous ether.
Her soldier brothers and her father have little time for her endeavours and want to seek out the watchmaker, Keita Mori, a man from a Japanese samurai family who can foresee alternative futures and creates complicated clockwork creatures.
The paths of these three move with increasing momentum in interlocking and strengthening twists, carrying the story to the climax at the premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado.
Willie Campbell is a Dunedin educator.
