Review by New York Times Review
IT'S 1859, and a man named Merrick Tremayne is marooned in a moldering 20room house in Cornwall, the southernmost county in England. During his previous career as an opium smuggler for the East India Company, a shell smashed up one of his legs and he's making a slow recovery. From here Natasha Pulley, an English writer whose previous book was the wellreceived novel "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street," leads readers on an epic journey. This time the 30-year-old Tremayne is on assignment for the India Office, which has replaced the East India Company, and his aim is to travel to the Peruvian highlands to filch cinchona cuttings. (The bark of the trees, zealously guarded to maintain the local monopoly, yields quinine, in heavy demand as a treatment for malaria.) Also along for the mission is the explorer and geographer Sir Clements Markham, a real historical figure who traveled to Peru to fetch cinchona plants and seeds, and achieved fame in later life as the man who dispatched Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole. Pulley adroitly departs from the historical record to make the Peruvian story her own, turning it into a work of magic realism. Sinister statues called markayuq move like "howling carvings," having once existed as real people. Raphael, the expedition guide, has a form of catalepsy and sleeps for decades at a time. An ancestral theme emerges as we learn that Tremayne's father and grandfather once lived in Peru, and that the elder man knew Raphael well in one of the guide's previous incarnations. The plot, narrated by Tremayne in the first person, is intricate, even byzantine, with skillfully folded-in flashbacks. (One chapter records the episode when a shot from a British Navy ironclad shattered Tremayne's leg; another follows Tremayne's grandfather into the Peruvian forest in 1782.) Pulley's tale is equally strong on topography, conjuring the intense cold of the highlands, its air "grainy with snow," as well as a "frisky" river and the hot smell of the salt pans. Golden pollen floats "like luminous icing sugar." The stacks of the novel's title are phantasmagorical blue obsidian towers in the village of New Bethlehem, also known as Bedlam. Over 600 feet high, they're more glass than rock. The previous cinchona seekers to set out for the Cara vaya forest had perished. After Tremayne and Markham's Indian servants run away, taking the pack mules with them, bizarre plot twists ensue. Raphael shoots a man in the head. Ducks explode. A dead man swings from a cliff with a sign around his neck that reads, in Spanish, "I stole quinine trees." Roman Catholicism, native beliefs and Incan traditions blend in a seamless weave of spirituality and superstition. A lottery takes place to find new parents for a baby in a "hospital colony" whose members are "all twisted, or missing limbs or eyes." Lots of yeasty direct speech leavens the mix. Violence and danger shimmer in the air like that pollen. Eyes watch through "the pinstriped darkness." Mitigating all this, Pulley evokes a growing tenderness between Tremayne and Raphael, a redemption of sorts. "It would have been good, always to wake up in this way," Tremayne remarks after admitting, when the pair share a tent, that he had never before lain beside anyone. With pleasing symmetry, the story includes references to watchmakers and Filigree Street, linking "The Bedlam Stacks" to Pulley's first novel. So it's no surprise when this book ends with a jump forward to 1881, alighting first in Cornwall and then in a Peruvian monastery for a reunion between Tremayne and Raphael, just waking up from a 20-year sleep. SARA WHEELER'S books include "Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2011."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 17, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Pulley's beautifully descriptive language sets the stage for a mysterious and dangerous journey reminiscent of the grand scientific expeditions of the nineteenth century. Malaria has reached epidemic proportions in India, so the East India Company is desperate to acquire cinchona trees, the source of quinine. Merrick Tremayne, recovering from a supposedly career-ending leg injury suffered in service to the company, is called on to smuggle viable seedlings out of Peru. A skilled botanist, he was chosen for his family connection to New Bethlehem, a settlement in the Andes founded by his grandfather, a famous explorer. The village borders a forest of gigantic trees with strange properties, wherein the medicinal plants grow. The boundary is overseen by moving statues and guarded by unseen natives who kill anyone crossing into their territory. Merrick will discover secrets beyond imagining and an ages-old connection to his grandfather. Timepieces play a role, as they did in The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015), and fans of the author's debut will be intrigued by the link between these two historical fantasy novels.--Lockley, Lucy Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
On account of a leg injury, botanical expert Merrick Tremayne, the hero of this witty, entrancing novel set in the 19th century from Pulley (The Watchmaker of Filigree Street), initially declines to travel from England to Peru for the East India Company. Because Merrick insists that a heavy statue overlooking his father's grave has mysteriously moved, Merrick's half-brother, Charles, worries that he's afflicted with the mental illness that landed their mother in an asylum. To avoid either of the unpleasant choices that Charles offers out of fear for Merrick's sanity (taking work at a parsonage where he'd no longer see the statue, or being confined with their mother), Merrick joins the treacherous expedition, whose ostensible purpose is to retrieve cuttings from the rare trees that are the only source for quinine, needed to alleviate a malaria epidemic in India that has adversely affected the company's business. On arrival in Peru, Merrick encounters more oddities, including animated statues that give benedictions and a border made of salt and bone that is fatal to cross, which cause him to feel that he has entered "an imaginary place where the river was a dragon and somewhere in the forest was something stranger than elves." His quest to both stay alive and to obtain the precious cinchona plants leads to more marvels-and to tragedy. Pulley makes the fantastic feel plausible and burnishes her reputation as a gifted storyteller. Agent: Jenny Savill, Andrew Nurnberg Associates (U.K.). (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Merrick thought his adventuring days were finished after an injury forced him to resign from the East India Company and retire to his brother's estate. In 1859, a desperate need for cinchona trees, a rich source of quinine and part of Merrick's family history in Peru, requires him to travel there to smuggle cuttings past a Peruvian government blockade. He and an old companion head for the New Bethlehem settlement where Merrick's father and grandfather once lived but find more than they bargained for. VERDICT Fans of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (who will be pleased that a character from that novel makes a cameo appearance) know that -Pulley has a way with damaged characters who are looking for a new purpose in life. While there are steampunk elements, including clockwork lamps, there's also a subtle inexplicable magic running throughout the unusual, remote setting. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]-MM © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Pulley's (The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, 2015) second novel demonstrates that the imagination she showed in her impressive debut was no fluke.The story opens in 1859, with the narrator, Merrick Tremayne, morosely nursing an injured leg at his decrepit family estate in Cornwall. Merrick used to smuggle opium into Hong Kong for the East India Company until an explosion a few years ago cost him his health and job. Botany and exotic travel run in the family: his grandfather and father both spent years in Peru, combing the Andes for botanical valuables such as orchids and frost-resistant coffee. Now the company wants to send Merrick to his ancestors' old stomping grounds, hiring him to break the Peruvian quinine monopoly by smuggling out cuttings from cinchona trees, the source of the antimalarial medicine. Is Merrick well enough to hike the Andes? Pulley understands her genreswashbuckling costume fantasybut she deals in surprises, not clichs. An exploding tree, a mysterious moving statue, and a visit from an old friend help make up Merrick's mind, propelling him across the ocean to a strange world of thin air, volcanic glass, and floating cities, where descendants of the Incas keep magical secrets. Strictly speaking, this is a prequela few paragraphs and a character or two tie this novel to Pulley's masterful debutbut the two books have very different atmospheres. Where Pulley's first novel sparkled with the ingenuity of spinning gears, her second offers a slower, sadder meditation on love, trust, and the passage of time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
