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John Holdsworth, author of a treatise debunking the existence of ghosts, is hired to rehabilitate a Cambridge commoner who has been incarcerated in a private mental home after claiming to have seen the ghost of a dead woman prowling the College grounds. Parents who worry about sending their tender eighteen-year-olds off to hard-drinking university Welcome Weeks should be grateful the kids are not going to Cambridge in 1786. At the fictional Jerusalem College, at least, the young and well-connected might be tapped to enter the secret Holy Ghost Club, where he will be invited to rape a teen-aged virgin as the final step in his initiation. The Holy Ghost Club is shockingly blasphemous, its head called Jesus and the other members named for the various apostles. Needless to say, all concerned are blind drunk and most are extremely young. One of these is Frank Oldershaw, son of Lady Anne Oldershaw, and the apple of her eye. But Frank has suffered a serious mental breakdown, marked by alternating fits of violence and terror; he claims to have been visited by the ghost of Sylvia Whichcombe, recently dead either by her own hand or another's. He is currently being treated, if that is the right word, in a private mental establishment run by a disciple of John Locke, whose methods generally boil down to bullying the mad into accepting that they are simply wrong in their delusions and cutting out the nonsense. Determined to restore her son to full health, Lady Anne hires the author of a recent treatise debunking the existence of ghosts, John Holdsworth, to see what he can do to reassure Frank. Holdsworth is himself haunted, though in a different sort of way. His toddler son slipped into the Thames and drowned; his wife spent the entire family fortune (not large) on payments to a charlatan of a medium who assured Mrs Holdsworth that her son was happy in heaven. In response, Holdsworth, a book dealer by trade, wrote a small book attacking the notion that ghosts exist. When circumstances require the couple to leave their home, the wife follows her son into the river and also drowns. Holdsworth is a vulnerable man on a number of counts. He is benumbed by grief and guilt over the loss of his family. Forced to sell his business, he is about to be evicted from his room - he lacks the resources to find another. He has next to no money, no likely trade he can follow and little enthusiasm for returning to life. So when Lady Anne summons him to go down to Cambridge on the pretext of examining the library to which she plans to donate her late husband's books, but in fact to restore Frank to a state of mental health, he really is in no position to refuse. The Cambridge he encounters is a closed and fetid world, both literally and metaphorically. Class-ridden and largely unchanged since first founded in the 16th century, only a handful of its members, the scholarship students known as sizars, appears to have any interest in studying anything but dissipation. Money and social position are what matters; the servants who keep the place more or less running are treated with disdain and indifference. Lowest of all is one Tom Turdman, as he is called, who trundles a cart about by night, cleaning out the privies. But all the servants must deal with the bodily fluids of the hard-drinking, careless students and consequently develop a fine and well-concealed contempt for their "betters." Even more shut in is the nearby private mental home run by a bully passing as a rationalist, from which Holdsworth succeeds in springing Frank. As the young man recovers at least some of his faculties, the true story of what emerged on the fateful night he lost his wits emerges and it becomes clear what happened to the woman whose ghost he thought he saw. There is an actual mystery at the heart of this novel, but the worse crimes are social ones - the inflexible class system, the denigration of women, the arrogance of those in power, though Taylor slyly reminds us that the disadvantaged were not altogether powerless and would take their revenge when the occasion arose. Readers of historical fiction are occasionally accused of indulging in a kind of romantic escape into a sanitized or picturesquely blemished past. The charge might have had some substance in earlier years, but the current crop of (mainly British) historical novelists, of which Andrew Taylor is a leading member, offers no such soothing times-out. Instead, by providing a credible and layered re-creation of an earlier epoch, they remind us, as Holdsworth reflects in a late chapter, "so this is what it comes down to in the end: a man's future haunts him as well as his past." The struggle between reason and superstition that informs AN ANATOMY OF GHOSTS is neither wholly resolved in the novel nor in our own particular time. Andrew Taylor's work is substantially historical, though he lists only three as specifically falling within the genre: AN AMERICAN BOY, BLEEDING HEART SQUARE, and this present volume. Regardless of period, he is amazingly adept at becoming one with his material and in his ability to induce the reader to confront the past on its own terms rather than through the often patronizing spectacles of hindsight. AN ANATOMY OF GHOSTS is at once impossible to put down and impossible to forget. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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