Book Review - The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor

Synopsis:  They say Jerusalem is haunted by Mrs Whichcote's ghost. Frank Oldershaw claims he saw her in the garden, where she drowned. Now he's under the care of a physician.

Desperate to salvage her son's reputation and restore him to health, Lady Anne Oldershaw employs her own agent - John Holdsworth, author of The Anatomy of Ghosts, a controversial attack on the existence of ghostly phenomena. But his arrival in Cambridge disrupts the uneasy status quo. He glimpses a world of privilege and abuse, where the sinister Holy Ghost Club governs life at Jerusalem more effectively than the Master, Dr Carbury, ever could.

But Holdsworth's powers of reason and natural philosophy have other challenges. He dreams of his dead wife, Maria, who roams the borders of death. And now there's Elinor, the very-much-alive Master's wife, to haunt him in life. And at the heart of it all is the mystery of what really happened to Sylvia Whichcote in the claustrophobic confines of Jerusalem.

Why was Sylvia found lying dead in the Long Pond just before a February dawn? Why was she in Jerusalem at all? And how did she die?

First Line:  "She was not alone."

Random Quote:  "Books are not luxuries.  They are meat and drink for the mind."

Review:  I've always liked books set in Oxbridge.  It's the lush romanticism of it all that I got from a little too much Brideshead Revisited, I suppose.  The Anatomy of Ghosts takes place in an imaginary college in Cambridge in the late 18th century - a favorite time period for me.  It has hellfire clubs and faculty politics, illicit love and evil lords and their equally evil minions - throw in the possibility of ghosts, an inconvenient murder, and a mad heir and this would've been a fun romp through a predictable genre.

Emmanuel College, Cambridge - Image via Wikipedia

Mr. Taylor has more in mind with this book.  At its center is John Holdsworth, a bookseller whose life has literally fallen apart around him.  When we meet him he is living in the house where his son and wife drowned on the charity of the people who bought his house and business.  He has no money, no prospects, nothing but a cart full of picked over books.  He's also the author of a tract against spiritualism and the belief in ghosts - both of which he believes doomed his wife.  He has nothing to lose and everything to gain when he takes a commission from Lady Anne Oldershaw to catalog her late husband's books and to discover how to cure her son and heir of madness brought on by his sighting of a ghost.

There are scholars and ne'er-do-wells, thieves, prostitutes, drunkards and lackeys galore (and that's just within the walls of the imaginary Jerusalem College.  Within the closed and gated walls of this small community, Mr. Taylor sets his characters to explore the nature of loss, of recovery, of hope and despair.

Emmanuel College, Cambridge - Image via Wikipedia

This book is always entertaining with an unexpected twist around each dark corner.  Its true strength is in its characters with whom it is easy to identify despite their distance from us in time and space.  I especially loved his attention to his minor characters who rise above mere mechanicals and plot devices to actual people with their own stories going on all around the main plot.  This was a fun and engrossing read - highly recommended.

FTC Disclosure:  Advance copy from the publisher for review

Rating:  Purple

Reading Challenges:  Historical Fiction Challenge, Mystery and Suspense Challenge