If you have not yet gone on holiday, do pack The Anatomy of Ghosts. It is excellent airport reading; and this is no trivial recommendation. Airports are where one needs fiction most desperately — and nowhere more so than in Kabul, where I had to work through no fewer than seven queues for incompetent security checks, inching up a modern version of Purgatory. Even in these testing conditions, Andrew Taylor’s book beguiled.
The Anatomy of Ghosts is, like Taylor’s best-known previous novel, The American Boy, historical crime fiction. In a further refinement of genres, it is a historical campus murder mystery, being set in Cambridge in 1765, in a fictional college, Jerusalem, that bears a remarkable topographical resemblance to Emmanuel — even down to a huge and ancient weeping oriental plane tree in the Master’s garden. Some pedants may object that the ornamental planes in Jesus and Emma were not planted until the start of the 19th century; however, a 17th-century bishop of Ely boasted a well-grown plane tree, so this is not a horticultural anachronism.
Historical fiction, unfortunately, does bring out one’s inner pedant. Taylor’s book starts with a stumble: a coolly sinister account of a university hellfire club — the Pitt of hell — is marred by inaccuracy. The louche upper-class drinkers of the debauched Holy Ghost club, who name themselves after the disciples of Christ, apparently believe that SS Luke and Mark are Apostles. Eighteenth- century blasphemers would surely be better informed.
This, however, is a rare aberration. The great strength of the novel, indeed, is in its reconstruction of a tightly closed and unedifying society — a brutal aristocracy and brutalised under-classes. From the Master of Jerusalem down to the stinking night-soil man, Tom Turdman, all have an eye to their own advantage.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in