The Unburied - Softcover

Palliser, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780229135 ISBN 13: 9781780229133

Publisher: W&N, 2015

Synopsis

A gothic tale of deception, murder and mystery set in Victorian England.

On a bleak, wintry morning in Victorian England, Dr Ned Courtine arrives in the sleepy cathedral town of Thurchester for a reunion with his former university friend, Austin Fickling. Over 20 years have passed since they last saw each other, and Fickling appears anxious and gaunt, ravaged by a strange, existential guilt. In order to deflect Courtine's questions from himself, Fickling recounts the story of Thurchester's ghost, William Burgoyne, once a royalist and treasurer of the cathedral who was murdered in the aftermath of the Civil War. The macabre tale of murder and deception captures Courtine's imagination, and he finds himself unknowningly drawn into a world of haunting evil.

A masterpiece of Victorian suspense as well as a dazzling meditation on human passions, THE UNBURIED is a murder mystery that lingers - even after all has been resolved.

About this title

Review:

Though putatively a mystery set (mostly) in the Victorian age, Charles Palliser's The Unburied has more in common with Umberto Eco than Arthur Conan Doyle. Like The Name of the Rose, this novel is set in a scholarly community and features a lost manuscript as the McGuffin of choice. And here, too, the mystery is not really what the book is about at all. Palliser's tale centers on Edward Courtine, a Cambridge don with a bee in his bonnet about Alfred the Great. It doesn't take a great medievalist to figure out that Courtine has allowed emotion to cloud his reason concerning the Saxon monarch: his version of Alfred's life and character is so forgiving as to be downright suspicious.

When it is suggested that a source dear to his heart may in fact be fraudulent, he accuses his critics of cowardice. According to Courtine, those revisionist scoundrels doubt the veracity of his beloved source "because their own self-serving cynicism is reproached by the portrait of the king that Grimbald offers. You see, his account confirms how extraordinarily brave and resourceful and learned Alfred was, and what a generous and much-loved man." Now Courtine has come to the cathedral town of Thurcester because he believes Grimbald's original manuscript may be in the cathedral library--a manuscript that he hopes will validate his own version of the great king's reign.

Palliser takes his time setting up his story, seeding it with clues that more often than not lead to dead ends. We learn, for example, that Courtine was once married, that his wife ran off with another man, and that he blames his school pal Austin Fickling for the rupture in his marital bliss. Dark doings at the cathedral are also hinted at, with quite a lot of space devoted to a murder that occurred centuries earlier. Meanwhile, ecclesiastical renovations turn up some unpleasant surprises--and as yet another murder ensues, Courtine is swept up in less scholarly pursuits. As the hapless academic (a Watson without a Holmes) pursues one red herring after another, it becomes apparent that Courtine's psyche is the real mystery on hand. History, he discovers, can obscure as much as it elucidates. All these years, his obsession with an idealized past has provided an excellent refuge from the realities of his present. In the end, what he uncovers is the secret of himself--and the reader of The Unburied is treated to a fine ghost story, in which the ghosts are quite literally all in the mind. --Alix Wilber

About the Author:

Charles Palliser is a bestselling American-born novelist. He has published five novels which have been translated into a dozen languages, and his most well-known novel, THE QUINCUNX, sold over a million copies internationally. He has taught creative writing in Glasgow, London, New Jersey and Poitiers. He lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: W&N
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1780229135
• ISBN 13: 9781780229133
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400