How novel

03 Jan 2012

Since I have started working on longitude, I have noticed increasingly how often discussions of time and time-keepers appear in novels, creating an intrinsic link between narrative, human experience, time, and its mechanical keepers. I thought I would share here two of my favourites, so far, and continue to add examples as I find them. The first, is set in our time period, from a magical little book by Elizabeth Goudge called The Dean’s Watch, which features a wizened old watchmaker in a fen-bound cathedral city who lives only through his clocks. It brings to life a forgotten tradition of watches, ‘Isaac laid the Dean’s watch down on his work-bench … and opening a drawer took out an envelope of watch papers neatly inscribed in his fine copperplate handwriting. The majority of horologists no longer used these but Isaac was attached to the old customs and liked to preserve them. In the previous century nearly every watch had had its watch pad or paper inserted in the outer case, either a circular piece of velvet or muslin delicately embroidered with the initials of the owner, or else the portrait of the giver, or a piece of paper inscribed with a motto or rhyme. Isaac had collected and written out many of these rhymes, and he would always slip a watch paper into the outer cases of the watches of the humbler folk, for their amusement and delight. He did not dare to do so with his aristocratic customers for he feared they would think him presumptuous.’ It nicely shows us the cultural aspects of owning and carrying a watch, how these could be personalised, and what this meant. It shows the changing traditions surrounding time-keepers and attitudes to ‘personal’ time. Elsewhere, it also discusses George Graham and Thomas Tompion. The second is totally removed from the first in both time and space, coming from Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence set in twentieth century Turkey (about which I have written more extensively over on my own blog). He discusses the middle-class family clock: ‘It was German-made, cased in wood and glass, with a pendulum and a chime. It hung on the wall right next to the door, and it was there not to measure time, but to be a constant reminder to the whole family of time’s continuity, and to bear witness to the “official” world outside. Because the television had taken over the job of keeping time in recent years, and did so more entertainingly than did the radio, this clock (like hundreds of thousands of other wall clocks in Istanbul) was … there to persuade us that nothing whatsoever had changed.’ Yet, this resonates with Goudge’s work set in the eighteenth century, showing the cultural role of the clock, and how it fitted into changing traditions. The clock seems to represent stability in both of these and, ironically, a sort of timelessness. In other novels it plays different roles, as I’ll discuss in future posts.