Ghostwalk

Rebecca Stott

Random House

Otago Daily Times, June 16th 2007

The borderland between science and the supernatural has always been disputed territory. Although modern science regards the occult with scepticism, if not downright contempt, quantum theory hints at an unknown (and possibly unknowable) world beyond everyday reality, and historically the separation was even less clear. This provides fertile ground indeed for the author Rebecca Stott, whose novel Ghostwalk is a suspenseful mixture of occult thriller, murder mystery and histori-fiction.

Acclaimed academic and historian Elizabeth Vogelsang has spent years writing her treatise on Isaac Newton — not as paragon of scientific rationalism, but as the alchemist as interested in magic as physics (an aspect of his life downplayed by his contemporary disciples). It is all but complete when her son Cameron (a renowned neuroscientist) finds her body floating in the river adjoining her secluded property. Accident or murder, the only clue to her death is a chipped prism clasped in one hand — the very prism used in Newton’s first experiments with light. When Cameron’s friend and former lover, Lydia, agrees to ghost-write the final chapters, she finds the research raises unsettling questions about Newton’s early career. In particular, the suggestion that it was not his scientific prowess but his connections with the powerful and shadow brotherhood of alchemists that paved the way to academic success. The only reason he won the Lucasian fellowship at Trinity College in 1667 was because a series of accidental deaths left an unusually large number of positions vacant that year. Was this merely luck or were more sinister forces at work?

As Lydia works her way through the completed portion of the manuscript and the notes for the final chapters, she becomes increasingly entangled in a web of danger and subversion from both past and present. Not only is she haunted by the ghost of a blond young man in the scarlet robes of the Trinity, who seems intent on warning (or threatening) her not to continue, Cameron’s research into a new antipsychotic drug brings both of them to the attentions of a radical and violent anti-vivisectionist group, NABED .

Stott, herself a historian, weaves fact, imaginative speculation, quantum physics and the paranormal together to produce a mystery-within-a-mystery. Contemporary events are interspersed with chapters from Elizabeth’s book to produce what can only be described as a thinking-woman’s thriller. Lydia is one of the most believable narrators I have met for a long time, and seen through her eyes the events and places are almost surreally tangible.

The sections on Newton are extensively referenced and thorough (if slightly less interesting), and delivered a reasonably palatable history lesson. If I have one complaint it is that although one narrative comes to a satisfyingly unforeseen conclusion, the other’s ending felt unsatisfyingly anticlimactic. Or was the second merely intended to obscure the edges of the first, like the distracting play of light that chases restlessly throughout the rooms in which Lydia writes? Whatever the case, Rebecca Stott is an author to watch.