Fiction - eBook; Faber and Faber; 293 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of digital advertising agency i-level.
Billed as an historical thriller, The Resurrectionist, by Australian author James Bradley, was chosen as one of Richard and Judy's summer reads, so perhaps I should have known that this would not bode well -- I have never had much luck enjoying anything that this duo has chosen for promotion. Still, because I was fascinated by the subject matter, I was prepared to give it a try.
Now this is where I must add a disclaimer: I read this book on a Sony Reader, the first eBook I have ever read, and so for the first 100 or so pages I was still getting to grips with my new gadget and I'm slightly concerned that I may have been distracted and not paid the book the proper attention it deserved. Even so, I struggled to enjoy the storyline, not because it wasn't well written -- the prose style is superb -- but because it lacked narrative drive.
I know I have said this many times in the past, but at the risk of repeating myself I truly do believe that the best books are the ones that pose a question in the reader's mind at the outset, forcing you to read on in order to discover the answer, usually at the end. But in Bradley's Gothic novel I really had no reason to keep reading because I wasn't sure what it was I wanted to find out, in other words, no question had been posed at the start unless, of course, I missed it.
As much as the setting is wonderfully evocative and atmospheric (it would be a very poor writer indeed who could not describe London in the early 19th century as such), and the subject matter intriguing (how could the trade in stolen bodies not be?), I failed to identify with the main character, Gabriel Swift.
Mr Swift is a young assistant to Edwin Poll, the greatest of the city's anatomists, a privileged position that could see him make a name for himself as a surgeon at a later date. Instead, he succumbs to the charms of Poll's nemesis, the vampire-like Lucan, a resurrectionist who rules the trade in stolen bodies. From there it's pretty much a downward spiral into crime and opium-addiction.
Later, the book makes an initially unexplained leap to the antipodes where Swift now resides, which made me wonder if I was reading the same book. Indeed, I did momentarily consider the possibility that the eBook file had corrupted without me knowing, because how else could you explain such a change of direction in a narrative?
Still, I can't say I hated The Resurrectionist. It's got all the right elements for a good read -- fascinating subject, interesting characters, great prose -- but it lacks pace and, most importantly of all for a thriller, suspense, and for that reason I can't give it more than a two-star rating. Others, I am sure, will disagree.
