Darkest Peru
Dec. 30th, 2019 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: The Bedlam Stacks, by Natasha Pulley
I recall mixed feelings over The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, but positive enough that when this appeared in the work book sale I acquired it. (I discover on Goodreads I have read a few thousand pages less this year, but even so I am still working through a backlog of books acquired while at a job I left over a year ago). Fortunately I do not have reservations about enjoying this one, which stands alone although it does link up in a small way with one of the characters from the previous book. Perhaps it was the time of year; perhaps I was in the mood after finally conquering the Leviathan on Python; but this just settled right for me.
The story begins in Cornwall in 1859, where Merrick Tremayne is laid up at his brother's pile at Heligan. Like many good plots, the family fortune has somewhat dried up and amidst the decaying buildings, exploding trees and moving statues, Merrick receives an offer from the India Office that he can't refuse. Despite an injury acquired in China during the Opium Wars, he has been asked (though perhaps assigned would be a better word) as a horticultural expert to join an expedition to Peru, in an attempt to acquire Cinchona tree cuttings that can be planted in India, to improve the quinine supply and relieve an epidemic of malaria. But it's not exactly an altruistic expedition: the purpose is equally to break the Peruvian monopoly. On such moral ambivalences was the British Empire made, indeed.
Once the expedition arrives in Peru (under cover of searching for new coffee varieties, and also of charting unknown interior territory), they encounter Spanish descendants and indigenous peoples who variously hinder or help their project. The novel contains several fantastical elements, but in a way that enhances rather than compromises the story. It does seem slow going in one or two places, and I did find difficulty in carrying a visualisation in my mind, but I did feel this would work well as a film or TV drama. A good way to finish the year's reading.
I recall mixed feelings over The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, but positive enough that when this appeared in the work book sale I acquired it. (I discover on Goodreads I have read a few thousand pages less this year, but even so I am still working through a backlog of books acquired while at a job I left over a year ago). Fortunately I do not have reservations about enjoying this one, which stands alone although it does link up in a small way with one of the characters from the previous book. Perhaps it was the time of year; perhaps I was in the mood after finally conquering the Leviathan on Python; but this just settled right for me.
The story begins in Cornwall in 1859, where Merrick Tremayne is laid up at his brother's pile at Heligan. Like many good plots, the family fortune has somewhat dried up and amidst the decaying buildings, exploding trees and moving statues, Merrick receives an offer from the India Office that he can't refuse. Despite an injury acquired in China during the Opium Wars, he has been asked (though perhaps assigned would be a better word) as a horticultural expert to join an expedition to Peru, in an attempt to acquire Cinchona tree cuttings that can be planted in India, to improve the quinine supply and relieve an epidemic of malaria. But it's not exactly an altruistic expedition: the purpose is equally to break the Peruvian monopoly. On such moral ambivalences was the British Empire made, indeed.
Once the expedition arrives in Peru (under cover of searching for new coffee varieties, and also of charting unknown interior territory), they encounter Spanish descendants and indigenous peoples who variously hinder or help their project. The novel contains several fantastical elements, but in a way that enhances rather than compromises the story. It does seem slow going in one or two places, and I did find difficulty in carrying a visualisation in my mind, but I did feel this would work well as a film or TV drama. A good way to finish the year's reading.