A maggot Book

Dazzling. Stunning. The best I've read of him.
On second reading, the novel holds up remarkably well. It seems at first a study in the perpetuation of literary suspense. The book jumps between third-person narration; a kind of mock-legal deposition which permits multiple narrative voices; essayistic asides, and epistolary elements. The third-person voice often refers to the gap between events at the time of the story--the 1730s--and our present day. For example: "Closer,...groups of children noisily played lamp-loo and tutball, those primitive forms of tag and baseball. Modern lovers of the second game would have been shocked to see that here it was preponderantly played by girls (and perhaps to know that its traditional prize, for the most skilled, was not the million-dollar contract, but a mere tansy pudding.)" The novel begins with a tableau of five individuals, four of them male, of varying ages, who make a journey to the west of England on horseback. There is an uncle, his nephew, and three servants, one female. We come across them as they travel a muddy road to a bleak village. It is there at the musty inn, and later in a nearby cave, that much of the action occurs; action that will later be dissected by way of a series of legal depositions run by the dwarfish (and hateful) London lawyer, Henry Ayscough. We learn a few things during the interrogations: that nephew and uncle are in fact unrelated; that the nephew is the true leader of the excursion; that the uncle is an actor by profession; that the maid is a prostitute; that one of the servants is deaf and dumb; and so forth. Only the nephew who is not a nephew knows the true purpose of the trip, which for most of the book remains a mystery. We also know that the nephew believes he has hit on a mathematical device or formula that once fully developed will allow him to foretell the future. That is to say, he's crazy as a loon. Still, what can it mean? Why the trip? Why the subsequent investigation? And where has everyone gone? Slowly, one by one, at the behest of the nephew's aristocratic father, the lawyer tracks down all of the participants save one. And in a question and answer format that allows no room for description, or authorial commentary, he painstakingly gets a story. But is it the story? That's a very good question and in large part the novel's point, questioning narrative constructs as it does. It is the prostitute's deposition that for this reader was the most engrossing. For since her excursion to the cave she has given up whoring and has returned to the Quaker community of her parents in Manchester, fully forgiven. What she experienced during that journey she interprets, perhaps the only way she knows how, as an ecstatic Christian experience. She has been vouchsafed a vision of heaven and hell. Christianity is the only tool she has for interpreting such a fantastic experience. And there's no doubt that she thinks her story is truth. Lawyer Ayscough can not shake her from it. Nor can he believe it. And in the end is shaken himself. Like her, he is limited, by virtue of his place in time, to viewing it as nothing more than religious hysteria. The 21st century reader, however, sees what has happened in the cave as something quite different. I'll stop there. Like Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman, the narrative toys with metafictional devices, but never to the point where they distract. Oh, yes, you'll have to read this one.