If you drive down the A34 thorugh Oxford early on a summer morning as the sun is just beginning to rise to meet the mist coming off the meadows, you can catch a fleeting glimpse of the University's "dreaming spires" at their most ethereal. They are far off, elusive and full of mystery.
I thought of that view a great deal while reading Andrew Taylor's latest historical novel, The Anatomy of Ghosts. Taylor's story is set in Cambridge, of course, but the mystique, the sense of history and the rarified intellectual air is common to both places. And I thought of that view primarily because Taylor dismantles every last element of that image. What comes through instead is a Cambridge that is as venal, corrupt and searingly human as every other institution. It is wracked by greed, politicking, and the pursuit of personal gain, all of which throttle the more noble characteristics associated with these august seats of learning.
It is important to note that this is the late 18th Century and the setting, Jersualem College, is entirely fictional. Nonetheless, the hallmark of Taylor's historical fiction is its authenticity and meticulous research so it is entirely credible that Cambridge colleges of that era were final stopping off points for idle rich, young men ready to take on the important business of inheriting wealth and power than they were academic cathedrals preparing the sons of gentility for the task of building the coming Empire.
At the heart of Taylor's fine novel is the Holy Ghost Club, a powerful dining club that controlled life at a College where a weak master - usually an all-powerful figure in Oxbridge colleges - can barely contain order. Following a meeting at the Club in which he participates in its barbaric initiation ceremony, Frank Oldershaw, a young, wealthy - and therefore important - student is committed to the care of a mental health institution. Oldershaw claims to have seen the ghost of Sylvia Whichcote, the late wife of the divine head of the Holy Ghost Club.
His mother Lady Anne, a fearsome society figure with much influence at Jerusalem, is so concerned at her son's plight - or more particularly how it reflects on her family's position - deputes John Holdsworth, the author of The Anatomy of Ghosts, a work that refutes the existence of the supernatural.
Holdsworth takes lodgings at Jerusalem and begins to investigates the circumstances that led to the confinement of Oldershaw. What he finds is a web of intrigue and corruption that threatens the fabric of college life. At the centre of the mystery is the apparent sighting of Sylvia's ghost - and to unlock Oldershaw's future, Holdsworth must discover who - or what - was walking in the garden on the night of the ghostly apparition, and why.
But while Holdsworth is an objective investigator, with an open mind to events at Jerusalem, their perpetrators and their meaning, he brings his own ghosts to the tale. Grieving over the loss of his son to a Thames drowning and the subsequent suicide of his wife, he grapples miserably with the sense that ghosts are as much within as without.
The damp, dark and claustrophobic setting of Jerusalem provides the perfect backdrop for a splendid murder, mystery - just as the crowded streets of Holborn did in Taylor's last memorable outing, Bleeding Heart Square. In it he builds a closed, divided and divisive society: wealthy, indolent sons of the establishment and arrogant, greedy professors on one side and poverty-stricken, oppressed servants and students on the other. And in the middle are a cast of rogues making a living torturing and exploiting one or other of these group and in some notable cases, both.
The Anatomy of Ghosts is both thoughtful and entertaining, atmospheric and racy. It is another terrific addition to the work of one of the most talented and consisten writers in the genre.
