James
Bradley
The Resurrectionist
Picador, $32.95 pb,
335 pp, 033042226X
THE
MORTALITY RATE for individuals
is always one, but for
populations it varies
from time to time and
place to place. London
is one of those cities
where the mortality
rate is high, though
not because it has ever
been, like the Gold
Coast, a city to retire
to. For centuries, young
people have gone to
London seeking riches,
celebrity and opportunity.
Some, like Dick Whittington,
found the streets proverbially
paved with gold, but
others made their way
promptly to the gutter.
From the gutter to the
grave is but a short
step, but not the last
one in London during
the early days of modern
anatomical science,
as James Bradley’s
new novel illustrates.
This is an historical
novel set in the 1820s,
but the resurrectionists
of the title were not
evangelical preachers.
Rather, they were grave
robbers, murderers and
suppliers of corpses
(some suspiciously fresh)
to the respectable anatomists
of late-Georgian London.
They preyed on those
who had sought fortune
in the metropolis, fallen
by the wayside in the
pursuit of riches and
descended to death via
a path of crime, prostitution,
disease or drugs. The
resurrectionists were
the dark side of the
advances in medicine
that depended on a more
regular supply of bodies
than the gallows could
provide (between the
reign of Henry VIII
and the Anatomy Act
of 1832, executed criminals
were the only legal
source of corpses for
dissection).
This is the world Gabriel
Swift enters as an apprentice
to a respectable London
anatomist with a need
for bodies to demonstrate
anatomy to paying students.
As with many others
in the novel —
de Mandeville, Lucan,
Gunn, Graves —
Gabriel’s surname
is vaguely allusive
to dark literary-historical
figures or grim things,
while his Christian
name suggests an angelic
nature that events belie.
The Resurrectionist
is not, however, a comic
novel in the tradition
of other London writers
such as Henry Fielding
and Charles Dickens,
and little seems to
be made of nomenclature
beyond some suggestive
shadowing. Instead,
the novel proceeds as
a first-person narrative,
gothic in content and
realist in mode. Even
though the main skill
in a gothic thriller
lies in leaving things
to the imagination,
the quantity of explanation
is at a perilously low
level, risking reader
dislocation, especially
in the opening sections.
This technique comes
into its own later in
the novel, as we come
to know the way Gabriel’s
mind works and to interpret
the gap between the
spare (even numb) narration
and the chaotic circumstances
described properly as
a depiction of a mind
and soul in free fall.
A succession of accidents,
debts, a feud and a
developing addiction
to alcohol and opium
lead to Gabriel abandoning
surgical training, and
destitution leaves him
with little option but
to enlist with the sinister
Lucan as a grave robber.
The spiral downwards
continues and, near
the bottom, he reacts
to a particularly nasty
event thus: ‘I
should care, I know,
but I do not. With each
of them something dulls
inside of me. Even as
it holds me here I feel
a hopelessness, a sense
that this is wrong but
that I have failed somehow.
Of something once within
my grasp and already
fled.’
Sensibly, Bradley does
not attempt to put a
mock-Georgian façade
on his prose; neither
does he make the language
racily postmodern. There
is, in fact, very little
historical consciousness
in the novel at all.
For example, while a
friend of Gabriel’s
dissolute father is
described as ‘a
Methodist, as many were
already in those parts’,
none of the characters
seems psychologically
shaped by Christian
attitudes to death and
the body, as at least
some in the 1820s faced
with such experiences
would surely have been.
Even the sardonic description
of grave robbers as
resurrectionists leads
nowhere obvious unless
we are supposed to read
the middle section of
the novel allegorically
as a harrowing of hell.
The ‘hopelessness’
Gabriel feels is more
a modernist anomie
than a nineteenth-century
grappling with sin and
depravity, which is
fine, but it does mean
that The Resurrectionist
is only accidentally
set in the past. Gabriel,
in particular, does
not think or speak as
one shaped by a particularly
nineteenth-century education
or experience. He has
a detached assurance
as an observer of his
world that is more like
Albert Camus than any
protagonist in Walter
Scott or his contemporaries.
The publisher’s
blurb encourages readers
to find Gabriel’s
claustrophobic spareness
‘stark, sinister
and compelling’,
and many will, no doubt,
agree with this assessment.
Others might feel that
they are being asked
to make a lot of inter-pretative
effort when the content
of the text is essentially
that of a thriller.
To me, the novel could
afford a bit more elaboration.
It focuses so acutely
on a character who deliberately
avoids introspection
that it resists the
intellectual range of
literary fiction without
providing the easy narrative
gratification of a thoroughly
realised fictional world.
What we get instead
is an intensely physical
presentation of the
descent into addiction
and criminality. This
is capably done, and
the coda in New South
Wales (it is not for
a reviewer to explain
how this happens) sets
a subtle balance between
woundedness and the
possibility of redemption.
That fragile and demanding
container of individuality,
the body, is the book’s
central mystery: its
appetites and frailties;
its capacity to overpower
the conscious will;
its beauty and ugliness;
its different representations
by artists, writers
and anatomists.
In the end, The Resurrectionist
evades easy categories
such as historical romance,
thriller or gothic horror.
The least unsatisfactory
summary this reviewer
can devise for Bradley’s
unsettling novel is
to describe it as a
kind of late Georgian
grunge fiction with
an ambiguous colonial
coda.
