Philip Pullman’s Clockwork, or All Wound Up (1996) is a children’s fantasy novella with strong Gothic elements. Set in a small German town, the story begins as Karl, a clockmaker’s apprentice, despairs over his failure to create a new figure for the town clock, while a writer named Fritz begins reading an unfinished, terrifying story. When a sinister character from the tale appears in real life, their fates become dangerously intertwined events that increasingly blur the boundary between fiction and reality. The novella explores themes of Moral Responsibility in Acts of Creation, The Permeable Boundary Between Story and Reality, and Selfish Ambition Versus Redemptive Compassion.

A celebrated British author, Pullman is best known for his acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (beginning with The Golden Compass), which won numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Clockwork was also recognized, winning the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Silver Medal and being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. The novella draws heavily on the German Romantic tradition of the Kunstmärchen (literary fairy tale), particularly the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, which often feature uncanny automata and explore questions of free will, identity, and human agency. Through its recurring imagery of machinery and clockwork, the novella engages with Enlightenment-era ideas of a deterministic universe and questions whether fate is as unalterable as a wound-up machine. The book has been adapted for the stage multiple times, including as an opera.

This guide refers to the 2018 Puffin Books edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, child death, child abuse, suicidal ideation, and substance use.

Plot Summary

Set in a small German town during an era when time ran by clockwork, the story opens with a narrator’s warning: Some stories, like wound-up clocks, move steadily toward their end, and no character can change their fate.

On a snowy winter evening, townsfolk gather at the White Horse Tavern. Herr Ringelmann, the town clockmaker, arrives with his apprentice Karl, whose expression is gloomy and troubled. Herr Ringelmann explains that Karl’s apprenticeship ends the next morning. By tradition, a finishing apprentice must create a new mechanical figure for the great clock of Glockenheim, an enormously complex mechanism featuring over 100 figures, including saints and a figure of Death with his scythe.

Fritz, a cheerful young writer known for his ghost stories, approaches Karl privately. Karl confesses that he has failed completely: He never made a figure and now faces disgrace as the first apprentice to fail in hundreds of years. Fritz urges him to seek Herr Ringelmann’s help, but Karl responds bitterly.

Fritz then reads his new story, titled “Clockwork,” to the assembled patrons. He’s privately nervous because Karl’s confession is weighing on him and he hasn’t finished writing the story, planning to improvise the ending. In his tale, Prince Otto takes his young son Prince Florian and an old family friend, Baron Stelgratz, on a winter hunting trip by sledge. Two nights later, the sledge hurtles back to the palace, apparently driven by a “madman.” Servants find Florian safe but Otto dead, frozen stiff, his right hand still ceaselessly lashing the whip. The royal physician cuts open a crude wound over Otto’s heart and finds no heart at all, only a small piece of clockwork ticking in time with the lashing arm. The death is officially attributed to a brain contusion, and Baron Stelgratz has vanished. The physician suspects that only one man can explain what happened: Dr. Kalmenius of Schatzberg, reputed to be the cleverest man in Europe. He’s described as very tall and thin with burning eyes, a black cloak, and a harsh voice. Kalmenius walks about at night pulling a little sledge containing whatever secret matter he’s working on.

At the exact moment when Fritz reads this description, the tavern door opens. On the threshold stands a man identical to the one described. He introduces himself as Dr. Kalmenius and demands brandy. Fritz, horrified, crumples his manuscript, throws it into the stove, warns everyone away, and flees. The parlor empties until only Kalmenius and Karl remain.

Kalmenius mocks Karl’s despair and claims that he has come to help, proposing that one can control the future as one winds a clock. The narrator comments that this philosophy is flawed: Karl’s real problem is that fear of failure kept him from ever truly trying. Kalmenius directs Karl to uncover his sledge. Beneath the canvas stands a perfect figure of a knight in gleaming silver armor holding a razor-sharp sword: Sir Ironsoul. Without warning, the figure begins to move toward Karl. Kalmenius whistles a tune called “The Flowers of Lapland,” and Sir Ironsoul halts. He explains that a single word activates the knight, and once triggered, the knight will not rest until its sword reaches the speaker’s throat. The trigger word is “devil.” Despite his terror, Karl accepts Sir Ironsoul. Kalmenius declares that Karl has wound up the future and then vanishes into the snowstorm. Karl resolves to bolt the knight into the clock-tower frame so that it cannot move.

At midnight, Gretl, the young barmaid and the landlord’s daughter, comes downstairs, unable to stop thinking about little Florian’s plight in Fritz’s story. She doesn’t notice the canvas-covered figure that Karl left behind. While musing aloud, she mentions the trigger word, and Sir Ironsoul begins moving toward her with his sword raised.

Part 2 provides Prince Florian’s backstory. Prince Otto and Princess Mariposa cannot have children for years. When Mariposa finally gives birth, the baby takes one breath and dies, and Mariposa falls into a “dreadful swoon.” In a frenzy, Otto rides to Dr. Kalmenius and demands a child who won’t die. The clockwork-maker crafts a replacement from malleable silver, installing delicate clockwork inside. The baby breathes, moves, and smiles. When placed in Mariposa’s arms, the child revives her. They name him Florian, and for several years, he grows up happy and beloved.

In Florian’s fifth year, he develops stiffness, a constant chill, and a rigid face. Otto returns to Kalmenius, who explains that clockwork runs down and that the only remedy is a real human heart. He begins to add a crucial caveat, but Otto, impatient, leaves before hearing it. Otto plans to bring Baron Stelgratz to provide the heart, but wolves attack the sledge in the forest, and the baron sacrifices himself to save the others. With no one else, Otto gives his own heart. Kalmenius places it in Florian’s breast, and the boy instantly revives. The clockwork-maker installs a crude mechanism in Otto’s corpse, giving it enough purpose to drive the sledge home. This explains the strange arrival that Fritz described.

Five years later, Florian is a merry 10-year-old, but the same symptoms return. No courtier will accompany him into the forest. A hired groom, seeing the boy deteriorate, abandons him at a crossroads. Florian, stiffening, walks until he reaches Glockenheim at midnight, opens an inn door, and begins to sing his one remaining song.

Part 3 opens as Prince Florian’s song halts Sir Ironsoul just before the knight reaches Gretl’s throat. Gretl touches the cold prince’s cheek, and he smiles. Near the stove, she finds a surviving scrap of Fritz’s manuscript with a scrawled note confessing that he had no ending and that if he came up with something good, the devil could have his soul. Horrified, Gretl resolves to find Fritz and make him finish the story. She struggles to his attic lodging, but Fritz, flushed from brandy and packing to flee, insists that he can no longer control the story. Gretl leaves without persuading him.

Meanwhile, Karl returns to the inn and discovers Florian. Recognizing Dr. Kalmenius’s craftsmanship, he forms a plan: install the prince in the clock instead of Sir Ironsoul and keep the deadly knight as a secret assassin, tricking future victims into saying the trigger word. He bolts Florian into the clock tower, ignoring the boy’s feeble pleas, and returns for the knight. Nervous and sweating, Karl startles when Putzi, the old tavern cat, jumps onto the table. He exclaims, “What the devil?” (82), and Sir Ironsoul activates. Karl tries desperately to whistle “The Flowers of Lapland,” but his mouth is too dry. The knight closes in.

Gretl returns to find Karl dead after Sir Ironsoul’s attack. Upon spotting the clock-tower key in his hand, she deduces what he did. She races up the dark tower stairs, past bats and groaning bells and the massive figures of saints and Death, until she reaches the topmost chamber flooded with moonlight. There, she hears Florian singing with the last of his clockwork life. Unable to undo the bolts, Gretl wraps her cloak around them both and holds the cold boy as she falls asleep. The last thing she feels is that he’s growing warmer.

Morning brings bright skies and news of Karl’s death. At 10 o’clock, the crowd watches the clock strike. The familiar figures emerge, and then the new addition appears: two sleeping children, a girl and a boy, so lifelike that they don’t seem like clockwork. They yawn, stretch, laugh, and chatter, pointing out the sights. The innkeeper recognizes his daughter and cries out with joy. The children are brought safely down.

Florian is no longer clockwork but a real, living child. The narrator explains what Kalmenius tried to tell Otto: “The heart that is given must also be kept” (92). Gretl gave her heart through compassion while also keeping it, transforming Florian into a living boy. The town accepts him as a lost child. Herr Ringelmann examines Sir Ironsoul and finds only broken springs, missing cogs, and rusty gears, none properly connected. Fritz flees before sunrise and never returns, abandoning fiction to write speeches for politicians. The narrator notes that Kalmenius is only a character in a story. Gretl, who knows more than anyone, says nothing, and she and Florian live “happily ever after” (95).