Edinburgh, Scotland, 1828. Naïve but determined James Willoughby has abandoned his posh, sheltered life at Oxford to pursue a lifelong dream of studying surgery in Edinburgh. (Side effect of this being that his father apparently drops dead of the horror, a fact that his family will never let him live down. Ah well; you win some, you lose some.) Edinburgh is where medical discovery is at in the age of New Enlightenment, and the city’s university offers everything James desires to get his career going—except the chance to actually work on a human cadaver. (How are you supposed to learn to be a doctor if you don’t get your hands dirty?).
James doesn’t think it’s ever going to happen, as admission to Malstrom’s, one of the best private schools in Surgeon’s Square, is 24 pounds and he’s on a very tight budget; luckily he makes the acquaintance of Aneurin “Nye” MacKinnon, a dashing young dissectionist and Malstrom’s assistant. Nye promises that the admission will be waved if James just promises to keep an eye on the sexton in the graveyard underneath his lodging’s window (the sexton might be dealing with grave robbers, you know.) All goes well, until the night Nye throws stones at his window; see, the sexton is looking for Nye, and there’s a body in the shrubbery, and did James think he was a lookout against the grave robbers? (They’d prefer to be called “resurrectionists”, James.)
Now dragged into Nye’s world of body snatching (technically not illegal as long as you just take the body, and none of the personal effects; #truehistoricalfact, #moralwrongisdifferentthanlegalwrong), James will have to keep his wits about him if he wants to stay out of jail, in medical school, and not in a grave himself. Because a new team of resurrectionists from London have come up, and they seem to have an in with a new duo on the scene: the mysterious Misters Burke and Hare.
There is no way to have a sequel, and yet I’m sorry about that; I wouldn’t mind reading more about James and Aneurin. Yes, James started out a classist, obtuse snob, but he really grew on me. Iff you wanted a saner Dr. Frankenstein, or a nicer Dr. Dalrymple from Good Omens Season 2.
(Not that I know if he’s nicer-looking; for as much as Nye’s pale skin, black hair, grey eyes, and long eyelashes are described in great, intimate detail, you have absolutely no idea what James looks like. For some reason I just think of him as as older Alan Cox in Young Sherlock Holmes. In fact, Aneurin and James remind me an awful lot of Holmes and Watson in general; the brilliant minds, the height differences, the quest for knowledge, the indifferent at times views of legality, the biographer waxing poetically about the other’s looks, the homoerotic subtext….)
Not that it’s subtext in this book; in fact, in some ways this book is more about James and Nye and their love story than about the actual work of being a resurrectionist, the problem of Burke and Hare, or James’ rubbish relationship with his family. Only one of James’ family makes an appearance (his sister Edith), but she is so tiresome that if the rest of them are anything like her, I would gladly donate their bodies to Malstrom and his attempts to assist in the progress of medicine by cutting about bodies and boiling limbs. There is another woman, Mary Peterson, who I would liked to have more of than anything of Edith.
Rounding out the main cast are James’ friends and classmates Charlie and Phillip, the obnoxious Hamish (employee of the rival anatomy school Knox’s), and The Beast. The Beast is James’ trunk, and is practically a character on its own. On top of being almost as danger to people as Luggage from Discworld, The Beast also gave me the great ear worm of A Little Priest while reading; I was waiting for Nye to saw “Later on, when it’s dark, we’ll take him out of the trunk and bury dissect him”. I had actually thought at first that Dunlap was going to pair James and Charlie up, and the big drama would come from James hiding his resurrection work from Charlie, but I on the whole prefer the direction the book took instead.
This is the third time in recent months Burke and Hare have crossed my path; the first being the Andy Serkis/Simon Pegg movie, then The Invention Murder, and now this; for people who in some ways have been forgotten, I seem to be running into them a lot though I had forgotten that they would be in what was considered the tail end of “The Long Regency”. It was also nice to see three of my old favorites from grave robbing making appearances: the coffin collars, the mortsafes, and the grave guns. (#ripWeeMorag) Which shows you how truly in depth Dunlap went into researching her subject. Adding onto the list of actually people is Dr. Holmes, a phrenologist who was arrested (and being rich, only lightly fined) for attempting to steal four heads from the local kirkyard to use in his experimentation; what takes it into the realm of “that’s not funny, that’s sick”, is that one of the heads happened to belong to his own mother.
The backstory Dunlap also gives Nye is fascinating; born to a butcher on the Isle of Iona, birthplace of The Book of Kells, and home to the Abbey where Nye learned his penmanship and his drawing abilities. Seriously, I want penmanship like what Dunlap describes his of having. (and his attic garret, and his eyelashes, and his fashion sense, and his ability to speak Scots Gaelic…)
The ending is in some ways neatly wrapped up and leaning towards a HEA, while as I said leaving enough strings hanging (and being that enjoyable) that I would love a sequel. Even if it’s just a novella discussing Nye’s foray into bringing forensic science into the forefront (and apparently being one of the originators). Instead, I will have to console myself with her other book Dreadfuls, which is apparently about three teenage orphans attempting to prove that the woman running the Reform School in Whitechapel that two of them are sentenced to might be Jack the Ripper.
Read this book, I highly recommend it.
