Will Starling

Starred review from January 19, 2015
"What is this world's true calling, after all, save the driving of its denizens mad?" Such is the tenor of 19th-century London when filtered through Weir's magnificent new novel. (Daniel O'Thunder was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for First Book). An exuberant yarn related by young Will himself â "Your Wery Umble Narrator" â it is a sumptuous Frankensteinian potboiler of knockabout slang, scientific lore, rollicking personalities and atmosphere thick as fog. After the Napoleonic Wars, Will finds himself working as a surgeon's assistant in London's grungy Cripplegate district, where "sunlight itself is sullied." As intelligent as he is inquisitive, Will becomes well acquainted with unsavory elements of medicine, especially the grave robbers who keep the College of Surgeons in cadavers. He also learns of orphans disappearing; of corpses refusing death; and of Dionysus Atherton, a charismatic surgeon who, Will believes, is intrinsically linked to the city's evils. Weir's gift with idiom is without peer; as his narrative gambols about, the deft wordplay breathes grimy life into a wretched London. While its themes of death, scientific perversion, classism and poverty may be dark as pitch, Weir's style and wit ensures the novel remains a boisterous, subversive romp.

Starred review from December 1, 2014
Framing the mystery within Weir's (Daniel O'Thunder, 2011) novel is an extraordinary rendition of life in Regency-era London. The eponymous narrator awaits the noose at Newgate Prison. Will is innocent, but he's tainted by his association with the resurrection trade, provenance of those willing to haul a fresh corpse to the porter at Guy's Hospital for dissection. It's 1816. Many surgeons returned from the Napoleonic War expert with scalpel and bone saw. What had been a barbarous, bloody business began integrating into medicine as treatment, leading to a demand for cadavers to train prospective surgeons. Grave-robbing resurrection men supplied hospitals and surgeons like Dionysus Atherton, "brightest rising star in the chirurgical firmament." Others, like Will's employer, Alec Comrie, "a growling Scotsman with a bonesaw," avoid the ghouls. Weir's worth reading simply for his characters: grave-robber Jemmy Cheese, with "too much imagination for it"; his pawn-shop-owning brother, Edward Cheshire, a "scholard"; and prostitute Meg Nancarrow, "beautiful...in the way a small fierce thing can have beauty." A man's murdered over a resurrection secret. With Meg hanged for it, Atherton becomes "shipwrecked into obsession" over the idea the "dead may be summoned back." Weir has written a mystery worthy of every word while adding historical tidbits about foundling homes housing "[b]its of flotsam no one cares about"; the Bow Street Runners; slums like St. Giles, that "vast appalling rookery"; and Keats as a medical student. Characters rollick and scheme through a plot as snaky as a London alley in a setting as powerful as a chamber pot tossed from a garret window. No happy tale this, but Starling's adventures among the Spavined Clerk, the Wreck of Tom Sheldrake, Boggle-Eyed Bob and Alf the Ale-Draper are a delight all the same. What Dickens might have written had he set loose Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll to explore the doomsday trade.

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December 15, 2014
After five years on the front lines assisting military surgeon Alec Comrie, Will Starling has returned to London. It's 1816, London is breathless with discovery, and scientific exploration is displacing society's most basic taboos. Starling has developed an obsessive enmity for Comrie's old friend, grandstanding surgeon Dionysus Atherton, that's fed by a chance encounter with Atherton's maid. Phyllida Deakins confides that she witnessed Atherton reviving a man hours after he was declared dead, and Starling suspects Atherton is behind the crazed red-eyed bogeymen haunting London's streets. Desperate to discover the nature of Atherton's evils, Starling shadows the surgeon, joining the grave robber, prostitute, pawnbroker, and maidservant also swallowed by Atherton's plunge into darkness. Starling is a charismatic, engaging narrator, and his personal connection to Atherton frames an underlying story of redemption and the legacy of ultimate power. A fascinating, well-researched exploration of surgery's shift from disreputable butchery to medical science, shot through with an irresistible Frankenstein current; perfect for those who enjoy Louis Bayard's dark historical thrillers and Dan Simmons' Drood (2009).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)