The Clockmaker's Daughter

“In the story that her mother used to tell, the house has been a literal gateway to another world; for Elodie, though, curled up in her mother’s arms, breathing in the exotic fragrance of narcissus that she wore, the story itself had been a gateway, an incantation that carried her away from the here and now and into the land of imagination.”

Young Elodie’s captivation by the bedtime story her mother told illustrates the power of story, a power to which Lucy speaks and which Birdie dwells on at the end. The story of the Fairy Queen twines throughout the novel as a pervasive motif. Like Birchwood, a protective house, the story itself offers solace for Elodie’s grieving heart.

“People used [nostalgia] as a stand-in for sentimentality, when it wasn’t that at all. Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.”

In a novel about looking back and the impact history can have, especially in what passes from one generation to another, Elodie draws a distinction between romanticizing about the past and being more deeply touched by it. The preoccupation with the past, and how a future might have been different if an event had turned out otherwise, is a preoccupation shared among several key characters across the various timelines.

“Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favored memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and buffed for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside […]. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences.”

Birdie’s reflection on memory touches on the approach to stories and the passage of time, casting memory as a narrative that we create and an artifact we curate for artistic display. This passage glances at the later secrets carried by various characters—Lucy, Lily, Ada, and Leonard—that have painful consequences and which each might have wished to alter, if they could.

“I wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls.”

Mrs. Berry, Elodie’s landlord, speaks to the novel’s overarching approach to love via the theme of The Influence of Grief, exposing Elodie’s less-than-enthusiastic engagement to Alistair and foreshadowing the love affair between Edward and Lily which forms the kernel of the novel. The image of love as a sheltering house alludes to the protective role that Birchwood Manor plays throughout.

“Something, somewhere, has changed. I can feel it […] I feel connected. As if something or someone out there has flicked a switch, and although I do not know what to expect, it is coming.”

This passage provides an example of how the point of view in the novel switches between Birdie, with her first-person narration, and the close third person used for the other point of view characters, including Elodie, Ada, Leonard, Juliet, and Jack. This observation, coming at the end of Part 1, confirms Elodie’s identification of Birchwood and Lily—the first steps in unfolding the novel’s mystery.

“I have tried whispering my real name into the air around their ears, but only a couple have ever heard me, like my little friend with the curtain of fine hair above his eyes. Not surprising: children are more perceptive than adults, in all the ways that count.”

Birdie, who told Edward that her name was Lily Millington and was thereafter remembered by that name, alludes to the power and persistence of secrets when she reflects on how she wishes she could reveal her real self to someone. Tip, along with Pale Joe, are the only two characters who really see Birdie; this point draws the reader in by privileging them as people who also see the true Birdie.

“Sometimes I can still hear those schoolgirls. Faint, faraway voices, singing, arguing, laughing, crying into their pillows, pleading for a mother or father to have a change of heart, to come back and reclaim her. Their voices became trapped in the weave of the house.”

In an amplification of the central ghost story, Birdie suggests that she is not the only thing haunting the house; the voices of these young schoolgirls can still be heard. The device of haunting is one way in which Kate Morton explores the novel’s central questions of what survives a person after death.

“In the space of an afternoon, it seemed that the world had tilted and everything had slid off-center. All of the adults in her life had broken like once-reliable clocks that had started showing the wrong time.”

In a book named for a clockmaker’s daughter, time plays a central role, while allusions to and imagery of clocks make regular appearances. One such image pops up amid Ada’s anger at being told that she must leave her home in India to travel to England. This comparison to people as clocks echoes a statement that Birdie’s father, the clockmaker, made to Birdie about how people, like clocks, have faces that hide the intricate mechanisms beneath.

“To Ada, being a member of the Natural History Society was like being a detective, looking for clues and solving mysteries. Ever relic they unearthed came with a story, a secret life led long before the object reached their hands.”

Detection and discovery are the driving forces of this mystery, but they are diegetic topics since each character is on a quest to learn, discover, or find something, whether it is knowledge, shelter, or a diamond. Ada’s love of natural history reflects a love of the natural world shared among several characters, as well as a passion for history that weaves throughout the novel.

“The Thames here had a vastly different character to the wide, muddy tyrant that seethed through London. It was graceful and deft and remarkably light of heart. It skipped over stones and skimmed its banks, water so clear that one could see the reeds swaying deep down on her narrow bed.”

Leonard’s observation on the character of the River Thames helps to establish Birchwood as a quiet refuge compared to busy, industrial London. The river runs through the novel as scenery and symbol, but Leonard’s characterization isn’t completely correct; the gentle river that he knows drowned May Hawkins, nearly drowned Ada, and for a long time hid the Radcliffe Blue, an irony that gives the narrative texture.

“Britain was an ancient isle, a place of ghosts, and every acre could lay claim to being a landscape of legacy, but this part was particularly rich. Layers of human habitation could be glimpsed within the same parcel of land.”

Many characters in the novel exhibit an interest in history, and in the novel Morton peels back layers of events and history around the house of Birchwood. Leonard’s perception of the land around him also suggests that landscape, like Birchwood, is inhabited by ghosts, and shares an idea that novel posits elsewhere: that nothing of previous inhabitants is truly lost, and human existence is never completely erased.

“London after the war had been a shock […] Leonard was confronted with change and progress on a scale he could never have anticipated. Not just the world, but also the people in it.”

Leonard is changed by his losses during World War I, but his perception of how the world he knows has changed also speaks to the novel’s themes of The Influence of Grief, and The Toll of War. The novel hence traces the pace of historical change. Leonard feels disjointed and out of time, as is Birdie. The novel views the World Wars as epochal changes in that long narrative of history that Leonard sees in the landscape around him.

“The earth is ancient and it is vast and there is much that we do not yet comprehend. I refuse to accept that science and magic are opposed; they are both valid attempts to understand the way that our world works.”

Lucy’s speech to Leonard reflects her love of natural history as well as the novel’s preoccupation with history and knowledge. Lucy’s outlook on science and art is philosophically expansive reconciles her brother’s way of seeing the world with her own. In a vast irony, Lucy, proponent of knowledge, is the character who keeps the most debilitating secret.

“He wanted to tell her […] that by some strange twist it was the very meaninglessness of life that made it all so beautiful and rare and wonderful. That for all its savagery—because of its savagery—war had brightened every color. That without the darkness one would never notice the stars.”

Leonard’s realization concludes his point-of-view portion of the novel and is spurred by a moment when narratives converge and he sees Juliet napping beneath the Japanese maple in the front garden of Birchwood. This passage reflects Morton’s often poetic, descriptive prose style and the ultimately optimistic conclusion.

“I have come to understand that loss leaves a hole in a person and that holes like to be filled. It is the natural order.”

Birdie reflects here not only on one of the novel’s central themes, The Influence of Grief, but the question of what drives mystery and the longing to know. This reflects the reading experience of the novel itself. She sees it as a quest for answers, a kind of repair of a gap left by loss.

“Love—that’s what she felt, an odd, strong, general love that seemed to flow from everything she saw and heard: the sunlit leaves, the dark hollows beneath the trees, the stones of the house, the birds that called as they flew overhead. And in its glow, she glimpsed momentarily what religious people must surely feel at church: the sense of being bathed in the light of certainty that comes with being known from the inside out, from belonging somewhere and to someone. It was simple. It was luminous, and beautiful, and true.”

This passage, also illustrative of Morton’s prose style, contains Juliet’s realization while she is under the Japanese maple. The enveloping feeling of love can be traced to Birdie, who is buried beneath that tree and the spirit, now, of the house. Experiencing Birdie’s presence is a sacred experience for Juliet that helps her repair her relationship with her new husband. The parallel between Leonard and Juliet is one of the many symmetries and moments of connection across time that Morton makes throughout The Clockmaker’s Daughter.

“There was no going back. Time only moved in one direction. And it didn’t stop. It never stopped moving, not even to let a person think. The only way back was in one’s memories.”

This realization reflects Juliet’s prosaic, resilient grip on the world but also hints at the solace that memories will provide her now that her husband is dead. Morton’s exploration of time runs through the novel, symbolized in many places by the river. This passage highlights that the narrative time of the novel, which moves backward and forward, creates dissonance with linear time.

“[Edward said] what made a person radiate […] was intelligence. ‘I don’t mean the ability to explain the workings of the internal combustion engine, or to conduct a lesson on how the telegraph sends a message from here to there; I mean that some people have a light inside them, a facility for inquiry and interest and engagement, that cannot be fabricated and cannot be counterfeited by the artist, no matter his or her skill.’”

Edward’s comment to Lucy reflects his artistic obsession with beauty and interweaves mention of the progress taking place during the mid-19th century—one of many marking the passage of time in the novel. He also attempts to define the appeal of light, which serves as another motif of the novel, variously representing hope.

“When the queen arrived to take her children back to fairyland, she was so grateful to the old human couple who had protected them that she cast an enchantment across their home and lands. To this day, it is said that a light can be glimpsed at times in the uppermost window of any house that stands upon this plot of land, the presence of the Eldritch people.”

The story of the Eldritch Children weaves throughout the book. This fable also reflects the protective power of Birchwood, which fascinated Edward and inspired his unfinished masterpiece. This story, like Birdie’s point of view, helps unify the disparate timelines and many individual narratives.

“Lucy felt something inside her that had been carefully constructed and important crumble away, because she understood that the time of being children together, brother and sister, was over, and that they were each standing on different sides of a river now.”

The devastation of losing a loved one touches all of the characters in The Clockmaker’s Daughter in some way, but in this passage, young Lucy’s loss is one of companionship when she realizes her brother has grown up. The image of the river represents the two very different life stages they inhabit, while the crumbling and loss of Edward foreshadows the more literal loss when Edward is broken by grief and later dies.

“The river, [my mother] said, is the greatest collector of them all; ancient and indiscriminate, carrying its load on a one-way journey towards the depthless sea. The river owes you no kindness, little Bird, she said, so you must be careful.”

This quote exemplifies the function of the river as a symbol of the passage of time in the novel, at once carrying the weight of memory, history, and all the mistakes that cannot be corrected. This passage also briefly captures the relationship between Birdie and her mother; most of the main characters have lost a parent in one manner or another.

“A warm breeze wafted through the window and brought with it the sounds of morning birds and the secretive smells of lilac and mud. Light was turning circles on the ceiling, in step with the shadows, and I was watching them dance. I reached up to clutch at them, but they slipped through my fingers every time.”

Birdie’s last living thoughts take her backward in time and combine the image of the river with the imagery of light, which she tried to capture as a child. As a ghost, she thinks of herself as captured light, and as light, she embodies the protective, benevolent enchantment that the Fairy Queen cast over Birchwood.

“They had talked all night. Truth, beauty, and light—the room, the house had some sort of magic in it.”

The inscription in the room at Birchwood that was Edward’s studio not only inspired Edward but reaches forward to have an impact on Jack and Elodie, communicating the Romantic values of the house’s past.