James Bradley (2)Rezensionen

Reading this book in 2020, just five years after it was published feels uncanny. Climate fiction has that advantage that it talks about the possible future without much speculation. This is the case with Clade. We have been warned about what's coming, we have seen some of it happening, if we survive long enough, we will see more of it and it will get more extreme.

Clade reminded me of the British TV show Years and Years, which covers the close future of a family in all the strange familiarity of the current events mixed with some black swan type disasters nobody could have predicted. As we move along the timeline, things get more removed from the familiar, but the human connections are the thread that keeps everything together.

The structure of the novel was interesting. There are different characters narrating from their often limited perspectives. As the title of the novel suggests, all these characters are in some way connected to a character (predictably) called Adam. These are all done in the form of vignettes which range from deeply emotional to journalistic.

Adam is a research scientist aware that the climate change is going to transform the planet. He and his wife are going through a series of IVF treatments.The psychological portrayal of how their inability to conceive may be related to the reluctance to bring a child into this world was probably the strongest point of the novel for me. Adam learns of his wife's pregnancy while stationed in Antarctica where a large rupture in the ice sheet foreshadows the gravity of things to come.

I really enjoyed the first part of the novel, it was done really well and the story just flowed, clearly supported by Bradley's narrative craft. I found the the last one third a little lacking, as the characters had a limited perspective and were introduced abruptly so there was little emotional connection that would carry the reader through. Otherwise, this would have been a 5 star read for me.

But, overall, there is a gentle sense of optimism that never feels forced and a wonderful element of surprise towards the end. This is clearly a keeper and one of the best novels in this genre I've read.

I don't even know where to start, honestly. I was tempted to just review this with a 'yeah, nah.' Instead:

* Early on there are rolling summer power outages. In one instance the power goes off at midnight, and in the morning the character says 'all the food will be spoiled.' This is literally not true, and terrible research, which isn't promising for a novel based on research. How did the editor not catch this? As someone who has lived through rolling power outages, our first google search was 'how long does food last in a closed fridge during a power outage?' Hot tip, 80% of their food wasn't spoiled. The characters then repeatedly throw out their food after every outage and buy it new again. The privilege is insane.

* Cremains are not fine dust that feel as though they are barely heavier than air. A cursory google search confirms they are like coarse sand, and heavier than you think. This could have been a symbolic choice, but in a book of badly researched knowledge (sans climate change), it just feels like...bad research.

* Mystical 'mysterious' ex-doctor Bangladeshi beekeeper only exists to give one character hope.

* The amount of privilege depicted is genuinely incredible.

* Every woman character is detached, aloof or cut off from her emotions or only feels rage or dislike generally, and seems to be damned by her children (or lack thereof). The same can be said for Ellie, Summer and Maddie. Less so Lijuan. Whenever a man becomes detached or aloof, it's always implied or described to be the woman's fault, even though one man responds by literally *going to Antarctica* and yet...still...blaming his wife...for their distance. The latent misogyny embedded in the text is so present it's inescapable. Women are only really hopeful in momentary bursts. Men are usually the ones carrying the 'true emotions.' Whether it's Noah, or Adam, or Tom. Young girls seem to be allowed to have 'real emotions' too. For a while. But then everyone will wonder whether the girl will hurt herself because of them.

* The only overtly queer character in the novel is an underage teenager who pressures another teenage character to make out in front of a camera set up and then shames her when she doesn't, oh and also gives her drugs. Not...ideal representation at the best of times. Nothing else to balance this out.

* The ending is rushed. Suddenly there are aliens? But wait, 15 pages later the book is over! And everyone is staring up at the Shimmer, and there's hope, for no reason! None of the characters introduced in the last section are remotely believable, engaging or likeable. They have a poor excuse at futuristic names except for Izzie. They're not compelling, and what they have to add to the story contributes nothing.

Anyway, I could go on, but basically this felt like extremely easy to read garbage. I feel like I can kind of tell what this book was trying to do, but with no interesting characters to really hook into, and the author's willingness to slowly kill off most of his cast because of the dull plodding of time, there was no real reason to hook into future characters either (I don't always mind this technique, it's been done to great effect by authors like Anne Marie MacDonald, Jeffrey Eugenides and Arundhati Roy). The majority of storylines are never resolved, and are left open-ended in a way that feels lazy rather than creative or well thought out.

More like 3.5, but I did enjoy it.

James Bradley OAM is a novelist, essayist, anthologist and critic. I was prompted to buy his most recent novel Ghost Species after hearing him speak at the 2020 Melbourne Writers Festival, the one that pivoted online during Lockdown. He spoke with Irish author Caoilinn Hughes (The Wild Laughter, see my review) on the topic of Crisis Literature, and their divergent views were interesting. Hughes, writing about the GFC in Ireland, thought that time was needed in order to take a long view of events. Bradley, whose preoccupation with climate change features in Ghost Species as well as his other novels said that it’s not possible to reflect on the past in the same way because things are changing all the time.

So Ghost Species is a novel 'of the moment' which also anticipates a dystopian future. I think I read it too soon after Sally Abbott's debut novel Closing Down, (see my review) because I found myself comparing the two and finding the former more accomplished. I had also read Donna Mazza's Fauna (see my review) which also explored the complications of bio-engineering when a commercial company, Lifeblood(R), offers incentives for women craving motherhood to join an experimental IVF genetics program using non-human DNA. With the final elements of Ghost Species reminding me of the apocalyptic violence of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which I read ages ago before I started blogging, see a synopsis here), I didn't feel that I was reading original ideas.

It might just have been my timing. Readers whose reviews I follow at Goodreads think highly of this novel.

Ghost Species starts out with an Elon-Musk type of character called Davis Hucken setting up a secluded lab in Tassie. His ambition is to reverse extinction in the hope that restoring the ecosystem with thylacines, mammoths and aurochs can reverse climate change. He hires scientists Kate and Jay to assist with another project, which is to breed a Neanderthal in the hope that it might be possible to learn something from them.

Bradley doesn't dwell on the technicalities of the project, and it all seems credible enough — except for the people involved. Jay is keen from the outset while Kate is dubious. Distrusting Davis's charm, Kate asks why:

'Because we can. Because it gives us the chance to undo the wrong that was done when they were wiped out. But also because we need them; the world needs them. Look at the Earth, at what our carelessness has done to it. We can't let that happen again. We need to be tested by other minds, other perspectives. We need to learn from other eyes to see the world. Think what we could learn from them, from their minds. Imagine speaking to another species!'

Kate shakes her head in disbelief. 'Without an evolutionary context, a community, they wouldn't be another species, they'd be an exhibit, an experiment. All we'd see when we looked into their eyes would be a reflection of our own hubris.'

Davis gives her an oddly blank look. 'Perhaps at first. But you know as well as I do that the nature of life is to adapt, to change.'

'Even if you could reassemble the genetic material, you would require human surrogates,' says Jay. 'As well as human eggs. And I can't begin to imagine how you'd get ethical clearance. Human cloning is banned in almost every country in the world.' (p.26)

So, credibility problem No 1: why would career scientists put their entire future employment at risk by getting involved in a project that is bypassing all the usual ethical research and IVF protocols for an outcome so flimsy, i.e. that they might learn something from a Neanderthal.

Credibility problem No 2 is the surrogate, again bypassing all the protocols and caricatured as having no feelings and taking no interest whatsoever in the baby she is carrying. She vanishes out of the story as if she were no more than an incubator. (I kept expecting her to come back and demand to see the child.)

My rest of my review contains minor spoilers, so visit with caution at https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/10/08/ghost-species-by-james-bradley/

(Spoilers Abound. Beware!)

This was a frustrating book for me.

Climate Change is a hard issue to tackle in a novel, and most authors get it only partly right, mostly due to it being an incredibly complicated and tangled set of issues that affect every aspect of our daily lives. Authors, generally, manage to think through two or three strands really well, and then let the rest of the world go on operating mostly as-is, which makes no sense.

In Clade, extreme weather is grappled with very effectively and convincingly, and some aspects of larger impacts such as changes to daily temperatures and the disintegration of glaciers. Some parts, such as runaway genetically engineered species meant to mitigate some of climate change's harms, were a nice touch.

But the broader implications of how this would affect society as a whole are largely not touched on or considered at all. One gets the impression that after a set of catastrophic storms that take place over the next fifty years or so, climate change is largely over and we get back to normal. This is ridiculous. Storms are going to keep coming and getting worse for at least the next few centuries, and that's just storms.

Who is growing the food?
Who is picking it? Distributing it?
How is it being stored?
How is anything growing, in a changed climate subject to all of these storms and temperature increases?
Who the hell is spending their careers developing virtual reality technologies while society is crumbling around them?
And then who is financing these projects?
Who is mining, processing and transporting the minerals?
Are they still using fossil fuels? If so, god, WHY? If not, what are they using?
The characters are constantly flying all over the place. What in god's name are the airplane's fueling with?
What is the power source for all the technology that is constantly being referenced?

So that's one set of frustrations.

The other set is that climate change is apparently not enough of an existential threat for him.

About two-thirds of the book is about climate change. Then, having run out of steam on ice caps and monsoons, he brings in a plague, aliens, and magnetic pole reversal.

Why?

Finally, his underlying theme seems to be that human life will still be worth living (because we'll have fancy technology and great parties on newly formed beaches?), so don't worry so much.

We hardly need, as a species, to be encouraged not to fear climate change, since we're apparently so determined already not to let it bother us that in the 150 years or so we've known of the possibility and the decades in which it's been scientifically known as an existential threat we've done almost nothing. People will go on having babies, yes, and many of those babies will have wonderful lives, yes, but is that really the overall point that needs to be made at this juncture in our history?

I regret not reading Clade in time to recommend it for a Hugo.

I had a good attitude about this book early on when I read “Only white men, European men, discover. The darker peoples dispossessed, not just of their land but of their history, just waiting to be “discovered”. Or worse.” p. 42 So right, poor sentence construction aside.

Then it got really bogged down things like the science of map making, geometry, opera and every other damn thing that tangentially connected to the ship, the search and the documents hinting that the Portugese “discovered” Australia. I think the author didn’t have a story so much as a bunch of cool stuff he read about and tried to string it together with weak cement to cobble together a novel. The fact of Clair living in that disgusting shack is laughable. No woman, no matter how mighty the call of her healing nature or libido would stay in such a mildew-encrusted dump. She was an obvious wish-fulfillment vehicle anyway. Then Kurt’s ramblings took on the most extreme case of the maudlin it was hard to keep going. Enough with the torrid affair, what about this mysterious lost ship that was supposed to consume you and ruin careers? Nah, let me wax on about my prehistoric sex life.

Bah.

Book starts off immediately after the previous finished. Callie has just seen Gracie ( her little sister) and Matt ( her boyfriend) absorbed by the Change and she is left all alone in The Zone where the Change rules. Suddenly, her father appears from nowhere but she doesn't trust him entirely as he has experienced The Change but his mind seems to be his own, which shouldn't be possible. Her father takes Callie back to his old lab at the University and tells her that he had worked out an immunisation to The Change but administered it on himself too late to stop it effecting him. He also drops the bombshell ( which the readers suspected all along) that he immunised Callie in time. Therefore, she won't metamorphisize but she will feel the Change around her.
Then people who have experienced the Change start to chase her and her father appears to save her - but really can she trust him?
SPOILER ALERT ; She meets some new unchanged people living in an Ark underground ( hence the title). They are trying to preserve every unchanged species on the planet and the mad doctor in charge has decided to incinerate everything on the surface and start again where as Callie believes her blood will provide a better solution to The Change in being an antidote. The book ends with a cliffhanger.
NOTE : I HATE THE COVER!! The first book had a much better one. This is not as good as the first as there is a bit too much happening and this may confuse the kids reading it.½

Even as a child, Juniper is aware of an absence at the heart of her family and a deep sorrow that colours the lives of both her parents. At the age of four, she discovers the reason for this: an older sister, never spoken of before, who lives in a tower deep in the forest. Following her mother and, later, going on her own, Juniper becomes fascinated by Rapunzel, the beautiful girl in the window. Eventually, as a half-wild, untamed girl, sharp-eyed for herbs and fleet-footed in the forest, she encounters her sister's captor, the wise-woman Jinka, who recognises Juniper's talents and makes a deal with her: Juniper will help Jinka and, in return, Jinka will allow Juniper to speak with her incarcerated sister. There's only one condition: that Juniper must say nothing of Rapunzel's true birth.

As the years pass and the two girls grow into young women, Juniper develops an allure of her own. Smitten with the local worthy's son, Will, she seeks to impress him by taking him to see her sister in the tower - an act which will have consequences she should have been able to imagine. Bradley's story is a clever reworking of a very familiar story from an unfamiliar angle, introducing a protagonist whose wit and talent and independence form a stark contrast to the pretty, unpractised damsel in the tower. It's a story of mistakes and new beginnings, sorrows and second chances: beautifully written, with an elegance that belies its size. I'd certainly like to read more Bradley. I have a vague notion that I may once have read his Resurrectionist, but it was so long ago that I'd probably better have another shot at it.

While the writing was ok, sadly most of the story was pointless. We just watch three characters bumble along as they travel together. We don't really learn too much more about them, they don't really talk, the bad guys are beyond stupid... and then the story goes and ends on a cliffhanger.. but the characters never felt real enough for me to really care what happened to them or to want to read the sequel.

This is a book about how climate change will affect the future of the world. It starts out in Antarctica where Adam is studying the effects of climate change and quickly moves to Australia when his first child is born. After that it quickly moves to England where his now grown daughter and her son stay with him through an apocalyptic storm. The book jumped around a lot to the major characters but once I was able to get everyone figured out, I felt like it was a good way to keep the story moving. It was an interesting look at what could happen to the world if global warming continues.

Thanks to the author for a copy of the book to read and review. All opinions are my own.

** I received a free advance copy in exchange for this unbiased review **

This book was a pleasant read. The open ends are many, including the biggest open end of all, [spoiler redacted]! But that's how life is, and I don't begrudge the author the style used here. The chapters are much like individual short stories, that just happen to all take place within the same universe, with members of the same family. There wasn't a ton in here that made me say "wow," but it was almost all fairly enjoyable--thus the three stars. Probably especially enjoyable if you're more concerned about climate change than the average person.

For fans of Gone, the Last Girl and Road to Winter. Dystopian novel set in Australia which starts in Adelaide and moves North. Callie lives in a world where spores have infected the tropical regions of the planet ( from the equator outwards). These spores change the DNA of everything they come in contact with - plants, animals and humans. In an effort to stop the spread a wall has been built to keep everything infected in The Zone and anything crossing that Zone is incinerated immediately.
Callie's father was working on a cure when he became infected with The Change as it is called and was dragged away by Quarantine officers. Now Callie's 5 year old half sister is infected and Callie decides to take Gracie to the Zone. As she travels she meets Matt who is also travelling North and is keeping secrets from her. Not only must they out run Quarantine officers they must also run from people who hate anything to do with the Change and others who will just take advantage. Callie falls in love with Matt and will do anything for Gracie even though she is slowly losing her to an alien collective consciousness.
For mature readers as it contains sex and animal torture ( of a Changed animal). Well written and gripping has an awesome cliffhanger ending that makes me wish the second one was available now!½

An interesting and fairly dark story. Gabriel Swift's life starts out badly and, despite some lucky breaks, mostly, it gets worse. Not quite a 'page turner' but I enjoyed the story and its telling.½

I very rarely give up on reading a book, but I was so bored, unengaged and uncaring about the characters and the plot in this book that I gave up on page 225. Now I love a Gothic novel, but this was just list of autopsies, dis-interments, death, sometimes murder, broken up every so often with the odd slice of the London underworld, which does not a Gothic novel make.

Beauty's Sister by James Bradley is a Penguin Special, an e-book developed for commuters to read on a long trip or readers to enjoy in one evening.

Beauty's Sister is a re-telling of the well-known fairytale Rapunzel. Fairytales have been popular for the last couple of years, however this tale is told from the point of view of Rapunzel's lesser known sister, Juniper.

There is a witch and a tower in this tale of jealousy and relationships, and Beauty's Sister is a very quick and easy read. I'd love to have seen James Bradley write this as a full-length novel, but as a Penguin Special it's tantalisingly compact and entertaining.

(For another fabulous Australian re-telling of Rapunzel, you must check out Bitter Greens by author: Kate Forsyth; one of my absolute favourite reads of 2012).½

I was led on to James Bradley after reading his review of John Wyndham’s posthumously-released novel Plan For Chaos in The Australian a few years ago, and found that he has a thoughtful and interesting blog, City of Tongues, and a Twitter account well worth following. He’s renowned as Australia’s leading literary critic, but is also the author of three novels, and after reading his critical work for the past three years I thought it was worth reading one of them. So there you go, authors – all that tweeting and blogging and doing extra writing for newspaper literary supplements really does pay off. (Figuratively, anyway. I bought this copy from a second-hand bookstore.)

Set in the dark and dreary Dickensian London of the early 19th century, the novel follows Gabriel Swift as he is apprenticed to Mr Poll, an anatomist in the fledgling science of the human body. Mr Poll appears largely driven by the pursuit of knowledge itself, though most of his students are surgeons or doctors in training, with plenty of practical applications for their studies. The constant procurement and dissection of corpses is somewhat uncomfortable, but it’s part of becoming a doctor, no different from medical studies in modern universities, and it’s all done legally – except when it isn’t. The novel really begins to unfold as Gabriel falls afoul of the politics between Mr Poll, some of his apprentices and his former rivals, and finds himself caught up in the murky world of corpse procurement. Up in the lecture theatre, the science of the human body is a world of gentlemen; down at street level, it’s run by grubby thugs and criminals. (There were at least two scenes I feared were about to verge into necrophilia). The story is clearly at least partly inspired by Burke and Hare, though that’s a piece of history I wasn’t overly familiar with, so it didn’t impact much upon my reading of the book. (Come to think of it, it was Bradley who dismissed Jamrach’s Menagerie as being less of a novel for being based on true events, which I didn’t agree with at all. But anyway.)

The Resurrectionist is, above all, a deeply atmospheric novel. Bradley is an author who deals greatly in his narrator’s thoughts and feelings and internal conflict, with much of his interaction with other characters playing out in summary rather than scene. While I sometimes had trouble following the precise thread of the narrative, and the motivations of various characters, I very much enjoyed the bleak, foggy, dark London nights that the story unfolds in. (Actually, it strongly reminded me of the film The Piano.) There’s a surprising shift in tone and scene in the final quarter of the novel, but one which I thought was quite appropriate and worked very well.

Bradley’s writing style – at least in this novel – was a little too heavy for my tastes. At least half the text is devoted to what’s going on inside Gabriel’s head at any given time; it’s a novel built on introspection and philosophising. This may be how Bradley typically writes his fiction, or it may have been an attempt to capture a 19th century style. In any case, despite my own preferences, The Ressurectionist is an objectively solid novel, and I’ll read some of Bradley’s others before delivering the backhanded compliment that I enjoy his work as a critic more than his work as an author.

Gabriel Swift is a student of anatomy in London during the 1820s, dependent on the goodwill of his guardian. He is a likeable character at first, appearing considerate and kind, yet with an unfortunate tendency to submit to other men’s stronger wills. By accident he becomes complicit in the shady dealings of the body snatchers who supply the anatomists with a ready stream of corpses on which they can practise their craft. Through a series of events Gabriel sinks deeper and deeper into the dark London underworld, gradually abandoning his humanity in favour of easy money.

There is no denying that James Bradley paints a very dark picture of London towards the end of the Georgian era, and very atmospheric it is too. His prose often is a joy to read, and with his protagonist Gabriel Swift he has given the reader someone who is very eloquent and examines his feelings frequently, taking us into his confidence. Gradually a more unpleasant side to his character is revealed, as he becomes more and more involved in the dark dealings of the body snatchers himself. His situation created ambivalent feelings in me because I couldn't help feeling a certain empathy towards him, but I also often felt like shouting at him to shake him out of his passivity. It is painful and infuriating in equal measures to watch as he slips ever further away from a previously upheld morality, allowing the lure of easy money to become the thought foremost in his mind when it is presented to him, forsaking his humanity in the bargain; in the most unpleasant passages the novel recalls the notorious deeds of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh. Even to himself he shies away from admitting what he has done, only ever calling it ‘the thing’. When eventually his past seems to catch up with him, and he is shunned by everyone in the colony, I only felt that he was receiving his just deserts, and could not feel sorry for him. At the very end he talks about being remade, yet personally I can’t see it: at no point does he express remorse for the crimes he has committed, and, no matter where he goes, I feel his secret will always follow him. With his actions, Gabriel has broken the most basic moral code there is, and there will be no redemption for him.½

The story of one man's descent into a nightmare of self-loathing in which his humanity and compassion is sucked out of him. The novel has a brilliant sense of time and place with excellent moody atmospheric writing

The slippery, shifting nature of the storyline with its first person narrative and prose style can be difficult to get into initially but you are soon hooked in by the captivating writing. For example consider the opening sentences:

In their sacks they ride as in their mother’s womb: knee to chest, head pressed down, as if to die merely to return to the flesh from which we were born, and this a second conception. A rope behind the knees to hold them thus, another to bind their arms, then the mouth of the sack closed about them and bound again, the whole presenting a compact bundle, easily disguised, for to be seen abroad with such a cargo is to tempt the mob.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book but I felt the plot became disjointed, fragmented and inconsistent and ultimately I felt unsatisfied with the unexpected coda.

Bit of a difficult read this one. Slow an didnt seem to pick up at all. Didnt like the fact it was broken down into so many small segments. No decent chapters.

This is a very well written book. The style is very crisp and makes you feel like every word matters. This in turn means that, rather than getting annoyed by the way the narrative jumps around, giving you information piecemeal-fashion, you are quickly drawn into the story, wanting to know more. However, I never felt sympathy for the character or connected to him in any way which meant that once the plot developed I lost some interest. I also felt that the ending was very disorientating.½

The dark world of the early days of anatomy and those who supplied them with the bodies. Gabriel Swift starts the book as an apprentice, preparing bodies for anatomy lectures, but becomes involved with the men that supply the bodies, which pushes him down the road to social and moral ruin.

His name is well chosen, the angelic Gabriel and Swift for how fast it all goes wrong. Gabriel is an innocent, orphaned and all alone in the big city, he doesn't have anyone to pull him back from the brink. The body snatchers - Lucan, Caley and Walker- are well-drawn, providing menace and showing the underbelly of London.

The historical detail is very interesting, from the descriptions of the anatomy sessions and foetuses suspended in embalming fluid to how the corpses are seemingly taken by order from graves. But there is a but. I did enjoy the writing, but found it rather strange, sparingly written, which sometimes left me cold and I lost my sympathy for Swift. Interesting read, but I feel it lacked the necessary substance to be good.½

I am sorry to say that I have given up on this book entirely. I stopped at page 197 because I was bored. The book is said to be a brooding Gothic horror, in my eyes it is just brooding. A book isn't interesting because it deals with loads of corpses being dug up. It was found lacking.

I’ll be honest: this was not a book that appealed to me. The title suggested fantastical doings and the blurb made reference to three equally irritating ideas: our hero has a "nemesis" and will be "pulled into the sinister and mysterious world of Georgian London" where he "must make a journey that will change his life forever". So we have a set of clichés and a novel that's keen to assert its historical credentials. And, to add insult to boredom, there was a Richard and Judy sticker slapped onto the top left hand corner. (I have almost never read a Richard and Judy recommendation without regretting it.) None of it excited me; in fact, if this hadn't been a book group novel, I would never have lifted it from its shelf. As it was, I put off starting to read it until the last possible moment. Could it possibly be better than my sense of dread implied? The only redeeming feature was the recommendation by Markus Zusak, whose novel, "The Book Thief", I had really enjoyed.

The premise

Gabriel Swift, an apparently pleasant young man, arrives in London in 1826 to study with a great anatomist. Despite caring nothing for his new trade, he initially appears likeable and innocent. After being drawn into a downward spiral of events, Gabriel is dismissed by his master and is pulled in London's "sinister and mysterious underground". This (eventually) leads him to make a “life changing” journey. (Why are nearly all journeys in books declared to be “life changing”? Most of my journeys are simply necessary and, if by train, delayed.)

As I have already established, this premise did not inspire me. In fact, I was distinctly uninterested. Furthermore, it reminded me of other books I have read and seemed to lack originality. (In fairness, given the sheer number of new books published each year, I suppose that asking for any genuine originality is impossible, but this definitely sounded like a story that had done the rounds a few times, lost its hat along the way, and was now limping into a new paperback edition.) However, the blurb certainly suggests a dramatic and intense novel, which this was, so it did prepare me for the content of the story. That said, this blurb appears to be an overview of the whole plot rather than simply setting up the opening situation, and this meant I spent a couple of hundred pages waiting for Gabriel to get fired. I found this a little frustrating as if I'm expecting something significant to happen in terms of the plot, as revealed by the blurb, I do expect it to happen rather earlier on, as a general rule. As for the “journey”, by the time it happened I’d forgotten it was supposed to. If you’re a tad on the impatient side yourself, you may understand my frustration.

My thoughts

The opening seemed promising, despite my doubts about the story as a whole. The novel opens with a scene of oddly respectful grave robbing – or rather, corpse cleaning. The robbing has been committed by others and the money which has changed hands is neatly recorded in a ledger. Eight guineas for a 'large' and four guineas for a 'small'. A shilling per inch for a foetus. The casual detachment is perhaps a little unsettling and, of course, the scene instantly brings to mind
Hare and Burke, the nineteenth century grave robbers who created their own corpses when robbing graves became a bit too much of a chore. I thought this was an extremely engaging opening and I began to hope that I would enjoy the story rather more than I anticipated.

Bradley has a highly descriptive style when describing physical movement and this is employed throughout. For instance:
“The teeth bite into the bone with a wet, splintering rasp, small flecks of meat and bone scattering before it, spattering the aprons we each of us wear.”
I will forgive a book much if it is well written and the teacher in me couldn’t help the thought that this could work well for teaching my pupils how to describe events in detail. (The teacher in me never seems to sleep, much to my husband’s bemusement when he sees me clipping out an advertisement or an article from a magazine. “This will work SO well for 9B,” I tell him happily.) I thought that this was one of the strengths of the novel, although, oddly, I had little sense of place when reading. London is constantly foggy and gloomy but that’s about it. Perhaps, as an Australian author, Bradley found it difficult to write about a setting that was in another century and country. Certainly, I didn’t have the same sense of place as one might gain from reading (for example) Dickens.

I was pleased that the diction and vocabulary were suited to the era without seeming forced or awkward as I found that it was easy to read but also gave me a sense of an earlier time.

The style is somewhat unusual for an adult novel. All the chapters are very short, always only three or four pages and often only two. Even these are further broken up by lines which separate different "scenes" in the narrator's life from each other. In fact, they don’t even seem to be chapters, as there are no numbers or headings, only large gaps and lots of white page. This created a real sense of pace, which I liked, even as it contrasted to the narrative style. Gabriel spends much time observing and reflecting upon minor moments - a colleague sketching, a friend chatting excitedly to a stranger. Despite this reflective style it feels as if not a word is wasted. We are never treated to Gabriel descending a staircase or moving from one place to another unless it is invested with portent. I feel that this gives the text a dramatic quality, as if we are watching a sequence of scenes play upon a stage. I liked this style as it seemed both purposeful and dreamlike. Everything felt relevant and potentially significant, and
yet the flighty nature of the story, picking up a moment here, moving on to quite a different moment later that day, gave it an unusual "feel". The episodic nature of the writing gives every scene a certain intensity whilst simultaneously making it seem part of a dream sequence. Of course, some readers could find this irritating, especially since, as the novel progresses, it starts to seem that words have been wasted since particular characters vanish or fail to attain importance.

Beside the main character, there are several minor parts. Many of them are imbued with a certain significance, but they tend to fade away. By the end of the novel I was rather frustrated since I felt that Bradley had been preparing me for denouements which never came, and what appeared to be hints preparing the reader never went anywhere. It appeared that most characters existed simply to mark Gabriel’s descent into darkness.

Gabriel himself is a bigger problem. As my book group decided unanimously, he is a passive wimp. It appears that Bradley wanted to show that people are neither good nor evil, but make decisions that have consequences. Great. Except that Gabriel doesn’t really make decisions. Things happen to him and it is nearly impossible to understand why he reacts in the way that he does. He falls into opium addiction, sex with an actress/prostitute and employment with a thoroughly nasty man – and this is just the start. I was genuinely shocked by some events as the novel charted his descent into degradation, but I couldn’t empathise with him as a character because his reactions were so strange. Partly this was the opium; partly it was the way in which everything struck him as inevitable. He wasn’t an engaging or interesting character for me and I felt that this was a real flaw in the story. As I didn’t understand or care about him, and there were no other important characters, the novel felt very loosely held together. It wasn’t gripping, which the opening had suggested it might be.

In fact, the plot is fairly predictable and stereotypical until Bradley reaches what ought to have been the ending. Actually, I think it would have made rather a fitting ending, although maybe the title wouldn’t be so appropriate. Instead of this, Bradley abruptly switches locations with 60 pages to go. I found this entire section confusing, boring and unnecessary. I didn’t feel it had a single redeeming feature and, although there was a sense in which it fitted the arc of the storyline, I suspected that it was all because Bradley was writing this with a particular grant… Actually, the setting seemed more real, so there was one good feature. I was more than ready for the ending by the time Bradley got there, but didn’t feel that it concluded anything. I was a bit frustrated that I’d wasted my time reading the last section and think I would have liked the novel much more without it.

Conclusions

This isn’t a novel to read to cheer you up. The world of the novel is a harsh one. Life is awkward, uncomfortable and painful. Settings are grimy and blood flows easily. Death hovers over the novel, occasionally clutching characters. By the end, I was actually rather bored of the descriptions of death. Throughout, there is a strong focus on physicality. Gabriel is grasped, the nose of a corpse is hacked off and bodies collide in a strange sort of intimacy. If you quite like reading plays, you might enjoy this as I feel there are many dramatic qualities.

It is portrayed as a gothic chiller but isn’t particularly atmospheric and, although there is a lot of death, and there’s a grim setting, there’s no melodrama or sense of entrapment, which I would argue are vital features of a gothic novel. The ‘hero’ certaibly broods but he isn’t a dark, Bryonic hero, nor is he a Machiavellian villain. He seems to be an easily led schoolboy and I didn’t find that this made for riveting reading.

I feel that Bradley tried to create a profound, deeply meaningful novel and didn’t manage it. So much that appears significant isn’t and I do not agree that Gabriel’s journey was life changing, or that Lucan was a ‘nemesis’. I do think that this is a little similar to James Hogg’s ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ in that it follows the moral downfall of an individual man. However, Hogg’s novel is much better written. I’d read that instead.

If you must read this, I’d advise borrowing it from a library or a friend and stopping at the end of part 1. Unless of course, you quite like the premise and the blurb and books about crime set in Georgian London. In which case, please explain the bird motif to me when you’re done. Thanks.