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The Resurrectionist by: James Bradley List Price: £7.99 City Travel Guides Price: £3.86 You Save: £4.13 (52%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback EAN: 9780571232765 ISBN: 0571232760 Label: Faber and Faber Manufacturer: Faber and Faber Number Of Pages: 352 Publication Date: June 19, 2008 Publisher: Faber and Faber Studio: Faber and Faber Sales Rank: 234 Related Items: Related Items:      see moreBrowse for similar items by category:
Editorial Review: Markus Zusak, author of THE BOOK THIEF: 'Months after you've turned the last page, James Bradley's words are still with you - brave, compelling, unforgettable.' Daily Telegraph: 'A classically claustrophobic Gothic chiller.' Big Issue: 'An earthy brooding Gothic horror ... Gory at times, philosophical at others, this is atmospheric stuff.' Guardian: 'Gripping ... the city is brilliantly brought to life ...A ripe, disturbing work.' Sunday Mercury: 'A gloriously gruesome tale for lovers of Frankenstein and Sweeney Todd.' Synopsis: This book is set in London, 1826. Leaving behind his father's tragic failures, Gabriel Swift arrives to study with Edwin Poll, the greatest of the city's anatomists. It is his chance to find advancement by making a name for himself. But instead he finds himself drawn to his master's nemesis, Lucan, the most powerful of the city's resurrectionists and ruler of its trade in stolen bodies. Dismissed by Mr Poll, Gabriel descends into the violence and corruption of London's underworld, a place where everything and everyone is for sale, and where - as Gabriel discovers - the taking of a life is easier than it might seem. From the Author: Q. What or who inspired you to write 'The Resurrectionist'? The book really began with the story of Burke and Hare, the two Irishmen who murdered sixteen people and sold their bodies to Dr Robert Knox in Edinburgh in the 1820s. The first time I heard it I couldn't put it out of my head. There was something so appalling and yet so weirdly logical about the idea that people might be worth more alive than dead that I realized I needed to write about how someone might end up killing for profit, and what doing that might do to them. Q. The surgical descriptions are very detailed - how did you research this? I realized pretty quickly after I started the book that I was going to need to see some real corpses before I could write about dissecting them, and so I arranged to assist at some dissection classes at the Medical School at the University of Sydney. Pretty quickly though I realized the bodies I was working with, which had been drained of blood and preserved in formaldehyde, weren't enough like the ones I was writing about. And so a doctor friend arranged for me to attend a series of autopsies at one of the big Sydney hospitals. I'm not sure I understood before then what it's like to work with the dead, how simultaneously intense and matter-of-fact it can be, but it was certainly an experience I'll never forget. Q. The descriptions of London are also extremely vivid - how did you go about researching this? Are you a fan of London? Although I'm mostly based in Sydney I've spent a lot of time in London over the last ten or fifteen years, and I know it pretty well. But in many ways that didn't really help - the London I was writing about has now almost entirely vanished, and so had to do a lot of documentary research to reconstruct the streets and places the novel takes place in. So in the end I let a lot of that detail go, and just came back to trying to imagine what the London of the 1820s must have felt like - the fog, and the noise and the slums - and the way people could just vanish into the city and never be seen again. I wanted the sections in London to have the intensity of a particularly powerful dream, or nightmare, that strange sense of uncanniness and recognition. Q. Why do you think Gabriel allows himself to spiral out of control? I think all of us have a self-destructive aspect to our natures which wants us to give ouselves over to events, to lose ourselves in the things we both desire and know we must resist. In Gabriel that urge is very powerful. For him letting go is a way of feeling real, of living in the moment, instead of on the outside. But it's also a route to destruction, as he discovers to his cost. Q. Who is your favourite character of the book, and why? I'm not sure I have a favourite character as such, though Gabriel is certainly a character I feel very close to, and who has a lot of me in him. What I do think is that a number of the characters have a very powerful presence, a sense that they are animated by very particular and often quite uneasy energies. And while there are characters like Robert, and even Charles, who serve as a sort of moral centre to the book, it's the characters Gabriel finds in the city's underworld - Lucan and Caley and Graves particularly - who are the most alive to me, even now. Q. The book deals with the idea of being reborn, new identities and freedom. Why did you choose to set these ideas against such a bleak backdrop? The sections of the book in London inhabit a world in which human life is frighteningly cheap, a place where people are bought and sold every day. If I'd wanted to I probably could have stayed in that world, and just explored its darkness. But I also knew the book had to have a second act, a movement out of that darkness and into the light. Right from the outset I knew that meant coming to Australia, but as the book took shape I realized what I was really writing about was whether someone who does the things Gabriel does can ever truly be free of their past. I don't know that I have an easy answer to that question, but that's partly because I don't think there is an easy answer to it. Can we really escape our pasts? Can we truly be reborn and become someone new? Q. Did writing the book make you feel any different about the subject it deals with? For example, the trade in stolen bodies, or that evil can never be taken back? A lot of things changed for me in the writing of the book. In particular I came to a quite different understanding about death, and the body, and mortality, a sense of the way we are both meat and something more. And I found myself brought back again to the question of what happens when we die, where we go in that space between life and death. I think anyone who has watched somebody die understands the sense that something happens in that moment, something present leaves, but what that something is, what it means, is much less clear. Q. What would you like people to take away from the book? I'd like people to think about the invisible threads that bind all of us to each other. And about the way we are all more than the sum of what we've done and who we've been. Because in the end it's these questions about how we leave the past behind, how we live with what we've done that the novel is grappling with. Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Good but not great...Displaying talent thoughThis book has stayed with me and I personally found that the second half worked after the first part (for those who haven't read the book, there is change of location and mood). However, it left me with a sense of disappointment. The book rushes along and I was left feeling that more attention and character development for fewer characters would have made for a more rounder novel. However, it is definitely worth reading and indeed was haunting at times. Rating:  - The ResurrectionistI honestly read this book twice. I thought perhaps I had missed something the first time but no I hadn't. I just didn't get it at all. I felt that none of the characters had any depth whatsoever and was baffled by the lack of real story or motive. I think the author was more interested in shock value. Suppose it will make the next best horror flick! Rating: - Weakly plotted and poorly characterisedEnglishmum.com's July book was The Resurrectionist by James Bradley. Admittedly I got this late and had to force myself to read it over one weekend but `force' is definitely the right word. I found that the old fashioned language, although no doubt authentic, quite awkward: `It is three months since I came here, apprenticed to my master's side so I might learn his trade.' I really, really enjoyed the descriptions of London in the early 1800s - he went into great detail about how they lived, what they ate, the people, the places - this was by far the most enjoyable part of the book for me. However I didn't really think there was much of a plot: orphaned chap comes to London, works for anatomist, gets in a fight (why ... Read More: Rating: - PointlessCharacters very poorly drawn - almost impossible to distinguish between Dickensian stereotypes. Nothing new - a story told often and more effectively by others. The two parts of the novel were completely disjointed. No surprises. Loved The Book Thief - hated this waste of time! Rating: - Such a shameI approached this book with high hopes - it was a R&J recommendation plus I liked the synopsis. Initially I thought the book would fulfill its promise; the writing was stylish and evocative, and there was a sense of danger and malignity pervading the narrative. I soon realised, however, that I wasn't interested in the characters as they hadn't been fleshed out properly, and whilst I don't expect things to be spelt out for me, there was too much left unexplained and the narrative more and more disjointed and obscure. I didn't bother to finish it in the end, which is sad as I believe the author shows promise. I think an earlier review has hit the nail on the head - it should have been twice the length and has probably been butchered by the editor. ... Read More: |
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