I started reading this book the day after I learned that I might be taking another trip to Cambridge (England) for a few days for work in January. If this trip happens, it’ll be my third visit: the first time, in March 2008, I stayed for eight days, the second time, in October 2008, for six days. While I certainly don’t know the city well, I made a point of taking exploratory walks in the mornings, so I know it a little; it’s satisfying to read a book set there and be able to picture places (the Parkside police station, St. Edward’s Passage), and it’s satisfying, too, to read a book set there and think of walking those streets again.
Having recently read and greatly enjoyed The Coral Thief, I was looking forward to wonderful bits of history, and this book did indeed have those. For example: I really liked the below passage, about imagining Stourbridge Fair in Cambridge in the seventeenth century.
“[…] Think of the trades, the guilds who have come here: goldsmiths, toymakers, braziers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, wigmakers, drapers, pewterers, china warehouses, puppeteers, and prostitutes, and among them all coffee shops, eating houses, brandy shops. There are jugglers, acrobats, and clowns. You are standing among all the tents and booths. What can you smell? Close your eyes.”
“Manure, brandy, the seawater smells of oyster shells, the perfumes of soaps, tanning, leather, oil from the wool fleeces piled around the Leper Chapel. Smells and perfumes mingled into each other as the sun rose. I walked through the thoroughfares, invisible to the ghostly sellers, running my hands over wool, silks, spices, oyster shells; I felt dried hops running through my fingers, the marbling of books on my fingertips; I heard cries, accents from all over England and northern Europe, men and women from Lancashire, Holland, Germany, Yorkshire—chickens, horses, iron, the chains of scales working. Sex, riot, and desire.” (p 17)
(Aside: Stott’s passage is indebted to a passage by Daniel Defoe, which appears in a book that I clearly ought to read. Defoe’s passage, from p 37 of Yale University Press’s abridged and illustrated edition of A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain:
“It is impossible to describe all the parts and circumstances of this fair exactly; the shops are placed in rows like streets, whereof one is call’d Cheapside; and here, as in several other streets, are all sorts of trades, who sell by retail, and who come principally from London with their goods; scarce any trades are omitted, goldsmiths, toyshops, brasiers, turner, milleners, haberdashers, hatters, mercers, drapers, pewtrers, chinawarehouses, and in a word all trades that can be named in London, with coffee-houses, taverns, brandy-shops, and eating-houses, innumerable, and all in tents, and booths, as above.”)
I think Stott’s at her best with description, bits like the above and like this, and other passages about Cambridge, about the rowan berries and the punts and the Leper’s Chapel and the bridges:
“Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars.” (p 123)
Compared to The Coral Thief, this sometimes reads to me like a first novel (which it is): the dialogue’s a little clunky, things don’t always flow. Ghostwalk starts with one frame then another, scene-setting, background: a little over-explained. (I think I would have liked the book better if it had just started with this sentence, which starts a paragraph midway down page 5, and then backtracked a little: “Alongside Elizabeth’s body floating red in the river, there are other places where this story needs to start, places I can see now but wouldn’t have seen then, other beginnings which were all connected.”) But it’s good more often than it’s not: color and light, a sense of place, romance, and wonderful descriptive passages.
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