The great work of alchemy is both the subject and the controlling metaphor for this novel. Lydia Brooke takes on the task of ghost-writing the last chapters and final draft of a study of Isaac Newton's involvement with alchemy written by her friend, Elizabeth Vogelsang (also the mother of her former lover.) Initially Lydia sees the major elements of that process as Elizabeth's existing research and writing on Newton and the author's ideas about where the study was going, ideas that must be recovered from notes and conversations with Elizabeth's friends. The work is undertaken in Elizabeth's studio, a veritable retort of a space, all glass and light - air bright with sun and fire, the earth of an apple orchard all around, and the river on the margins.
The reader soon realizes what Lydia refuses to recognize: Elizabeth's son, Cameron Brown, Lydia's lover for a decade past, is a major element of the process in the studio. So the process she is consciously working on is not the process actually in motion. Lydia is not the alchemist here; that is Elizabeth - or, more precisely, the historical past. Lydia and Cameron are the elements in the chemical marriage. The really brilliant decision to narrate the novel as first-person directly addressed to Cameron underscores this.
But for the great work to succeed, the elements and the adept must be pure, a point Stott makes with the Isaac Newton material. No one is pure in this novel. Lydia lies to herself, to her friends, to Cameron, lies unnecessarily, casually almost. Cameron lies enormously, to everyone, and cheats cruelly, as well as undertaking a truly wicked course of action. And yet, perhaps the most impure element here is Elizabeth - as a metaphor for the past -- whose unexplained death opens the book.
Although the past intrudes, sometimes violently, the novel isn't actually a time-slip, insofar as we are not taken back to the 17th century. But there are long passages from Elizabeth's manuscript describing life for Newton in Cambridge of the 1660s. One reviewer here objects to that, but the novel is about perspective - Elizabeth's and Lydia's as well as Newton's. Putting the reader unproblematically into the past wouldn't work here; it needs to be mediated, since the work of writing is all about mediating reality.
As I read the book, I did wonder about the decision to market it as a thriller. It has very frightening moments and a number of people die violent deaths. On those grounds, yes, it is a thriller. But thrillers as a genre are not especially intellectual, generally relying more on action than introspection (says I, their constant reader.) This book requires thinking. But it rewards even the lightest efforts with a vast array of gifts - the history of glass-making, life during the plague years, glimpses into the alchemical work of writing itself, college politics in the rarified air of Trinity during Newton's time, a powerful love story and the tattered edges of a massive moral dilemma, the fascinating Stourbridge Fair pulling goods and betters from all over Europe through the dark maze of Fen canals to the very edge of Cambridge.
What I most admire most about the novel is the exquisite blend of science and beyond-science, both in the specifics of the book Lydia is completing and in the things that happen to her in and around the studio. The constant text messages provide an elegant present-tense example of time and space being magiced away. The characters, as other reviewers note, are wonderfully drawn. But almost as great is my admiration for the places Stott chooses not to go. She uses the animal-rights people, but she doesn't let that powerful topic pull her off-target. And resisting both the lure and the considerable marketing value of the Rosicrucians and other esoteric secret societies is positively heroic.
Talking with my friends, I divide books into two categories: Good Books and murder mysteries. They read Good Books, mostly, best sellers and Booker Prize winners and the things that people talk about at dinner parties. I read murder mysteries and thrillers.
With Stott's novel, I find that I have accidentally read a Good Book.
