The Kingdoms
Natasha Pulley’s latest novel, The Kingdoms, imagines an alternate future if the British had lost the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Fans of Pulley’s Filigree Street books will find a colder, harder, and much more deadly universe as the book’s protagonist, Joe Tournier, travels through an alternate Britain, with cities named Londres and Pont du Cam. In Joe’s London, it is 1895, French is the national language, and British subjects are slaves who are the property of French owners. Joe, a lighthouse repairman, makes his way to Scotland to restore an old lighthouse and to find the source of memories he cannot explain.
An early scene involving the shooting of tortoises for scientific purposes signals Pulley’s departure from the comfortable borderlands of fantasy and YA that her previous novels occupied. Yet the fracturing of time remains her bread and butter. She is at her best when concocting gripping mysteries that weave layers of temporality through her chapters, setting up collisions between characters and future versions of themselves with a meticulous attention to plot that makes the impossible seem not only plausible but inevitable – in this case, for individuals as well as entire nations.