Since we had left the Navy, Clem had meandered about on archaeology expeditions while I'd been forged into a machine on the anvil of the East India Company. I was the stronger of us by far but I'd forgotten, because I was too used to feeling broken. Then I'd lashed out ... [loc. 4098]
Merrick Tremayne is living in a delapidated manor house in Cornwall, with no prospect of employment due to injuries sustained in the course of duty. (Or were they?) Then his former East India Company handler sends him on an expedition to darkest Peru, in search of a new source of quinine to combat the malaria epidemic that is impacting the Company's revenue. The leader of the expedition is Merrick's old friend (and captain) Clem, Lord Markham: also accompanying them is Clem's wife Minna. Merrick, keen to escape his hostile brother and his own delusions, accepts, albeit reluctantly because of his disability.
The journey to Peru is skimmed: the story only really picks up when Clem and Merrick set off into the mountains, heading for the settlement of New Bethlehem -- which Merrick's father and grandfather visited -- in the company of a moody Peruvian named Raphael. Their new companion is not especially informative, either about quinine or about the lifelike statues that the Indians [sic] revere. But he's an adequate guide when it comes to the perils of the Andes, and he brings them safely to the surreal settlement of Bedlam: a town built on three six-hundred-foot stacks which are part-obsidian, and through which the refracted sun heats parts of the river to boiling point.
That's not the only unique feature of the place. It is, says Raphael a hospital colony: this is where the damaged and infirm come. And it is on the border, divided only by a line of salt and bones from the whitewood forest where indescribable dangers -- or perhaps just marauding tribes -- roam free.
As in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Pulley's writing is rich with detail: she's especially good on body language and the unspoken. "He caught me looking and flared his eyes at me to ask why. I opened my hand gently away from myself like an orator, to say he spoke well. He frowned, but his shoulders tacked shyly." [loc. 1888] And it's true, Raphael is eloquent, in English and Spanish as well as Quechua, when he wants to be. His English is curiously old-fashioned, though.
I wasn't wholly convinced by the historical setting of the previous novel -- one of whose characters appears in The Bedlam Stacks -- but here the setting feels wholly integral to the plot. The quinine monopolies, the East India Company's opium trade, the casual racism and antisemitism, the great exploratory expeditions ("more and more it mattered that not every stupid endeavour ended frozen to a glacier with the Illustrated London News reporting what it had in its pockets" [loc 1105]). I suppose the early separation of Minna from the main plot counts as period-typical sexism. (It is a consensual separation with an excellent rationale: and the story would have been very different with Minna along.)
But at the heart of the novel is Merrick, straining towards rationality and refusing to see what is in front of him, literally or figuratively. His growing respect and liking for Raphael, and his changing relationship with Clem, is sometimes painful to read, but all of it rings true. I wonder if Merrick is asexual: there's no indication of sexual interest, though he claims to have been 'tritely and pointlessly in love twice with other people's wives' [loc. 4785].
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and ended up rereading it when checking things for this review. I love the dream-logic of Bedlam, the flashbacks to Merrick's time in the EIC and Raphael's past, Clem's anthropological theories, Raphael's snappishness, and Merrick's narrative voice, witty and bitter and ... not exactly unreliable, but somewhat blinkered. A splendid read, an adventure story packed with philosophy and spiced with historical fact and creative worldbuilding.
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