I spent much of the month getting through The Resurrectionist by James Bradley, as despite its being a relatively short book (only 333 pages, with many very short chapters and lots of empty space as a result) I had little enthusiasm for it. Anyone reading the blurb on the back and expecting a Gothic-horror potboiler dealing with Burke & Hare-type resurrection men in early C19th London, as I was, is likely to be disappointed. That is its initial setting, for the main character begins the book apprenticed to an anatomist who requires a supply of illicitly acquired dead bodies in order to provide specimens for his lectures. But that main character, one of life's voyeurs, is dull, weak, colourless, and the novel, which is written in first person, is frankly the same; the MC becomes addicted to opium and it's as if the book is written with the same deadening effect on the faculties. Far from being an exciting semi-adventure story, it's about the MC resurrecting himself (literally as well as metaphorically climbing up from the pit), but by the time this takes place I couldn't have cared less what happened to him, and the last 70 pages were baffling and turgid by turns, with most of the almost-interesting characters we'd seen in the first four-fifths of the novel left far behind. It's not badly written by any means, but that's actually also a problem, as it's very much Good Writing, with Themes and Ideas and Literary Devices and the author's heavy-handed manipulation of fate a la Thomas Hardy takes away all agency from its characters. Someone in the mood for a (definitely capitalised) Literary Novel might get more out of it than I did, though.
A claustrophobic and heart-pounding experience last week, of ascending a narrow open spiral staircase through the middle of a bell chamber in a church tower, just as the church clock deafeningly chimed the quarter hour, inevitably led my thoughts to The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers, in which bells and their brooding presence play a key role in both the plot and its denouement. One of her Lord Peter Wimsey books, it's perhaps not as smoothly written as some of her others, and there's a bit too much info-dumping about change-ringing for my taste, but reading it again for the umpteenth time still had me glued to the page.
Finally, to accompany the new TV series, I've started a re-read of a book which has links to both the above, a literary novel which is genuinely of the C19th (but rather more sensationalist than the Bradley), while also being one of the first detective/crime novels: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
