| | This book contains at least four mysteries and solves three of them: the mystery of the truth behind a 9th Century account of King Alfred, the mystery behind several murders that took place around the cathedral of the small town of Thurchester in the 1600's, and the bloody murder of a prominent banker in his house next to the cathedral in the late 1800's. The fourth and unsolved mystery is how to tie these stories together in an interesting way.
Unlike his massive earlier tome, The Quincunx, The Unburied makes no attempt to form the separate threads in to a cohesive plot--they all form objects of fascination for his somewhat bumbling main character, visiting an old college chum who he hasn't seen since a violent estrangement 20 years earlier, and they all take up significant sections of the book, but, in the end, they have nothing to do with each other at all. At first they seem fascinating but when all is said and done you wonder why Palliser didn't just pick one of them and leave the other two aside. In an interview at the end of the book Palliser even acknowledges that "the connections between the different narratives were thematic rather than literal" but doesn't seem to realize that this might be somewhat off-putting.
To be sure, he puts most of his attention on the murder contemporary with his main character but here he makes another puzzling choice by tipping his hand too soon and, through a series of blatant clues, spoils in the middle of the story what was intended to be the main twist. If even a mystery dunderhead like me figures your murderer out a hundred and fifty pages in advance, you are being far too obvious.
Initially, it seems as though Palliser is going to avoid the main pitfall he hit in The Quincunx where, after hundreds and hundreds of pages, he left you emotionally flat and caring less about the main character than you had at the start. The Unburied, in contrast, takes us through the protagonist's long-buried passions and engages him in tortuous arguments with the man he thought was his dear old friend. This is good stuff. But then, oddly, it ends prematurely: the protagonist solves two of the three mysteries, doesn't figure out the main one, and bumbles out of the picture, leaving the wrapping up of the main story to a new character some thirty years later. Needless to say, this pretty handily kills off any emotional involvement you may have had with the story. In the interview at the end of the book Palliser says "the greatest compliment readers could pay me would be if they felt that the novel had moved them," but it doesn't seem likely that many readers will be tempted to pay in such coin.
Of course the book has many good points. Palliser knows how to evoke Victorian England almost without trying, though here it doesn't quite have as much flavor as in The Quincunx. He is quite adept at dropping clues that don't seem like clues at the time, and can breathe life and interest in to moldy old quasi-historical accounts. And up until the end was given away, and it became clear that he wasn't going to attempt to bring the three stories together (earlier in the book I stayed up late one night puzzling over and inventing possible ways they could be tied together--ancient demonic cults, forged legal deeds given the stamp of approval by deceived royalty, etc), the book had me pretty fairly in its clutches. In the end, however, his compelling web of clues, red herrings and historical facts led somewhere rather uninteresting. |
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