Item: Ghostwalk
Rating: 3.00
Author: empressbrooke

by Rebecca Stott

A stunning literary ghost-story of entanglement and obsession; ambition and betrayal - set in present-day Cambridge, but entangled with the 17th century

The son of a reclusive historian finds his mother's drowned body in the tributary of the River Cam that runs through her garden. She is clutching a glass prism. Elizabeth Vogelsang's magnum opus, a book on Isaac Newton's alchemy, is incomplete. Lydia Brooke, a writer friend of the dead historian, returns to Cambridge to the funeral. It is five years since she has seen Elizabeth's son, Cameron Brown, with whom she has had an intermittent love affair that began years earlier.

Cambridge, she discovers, is in the midst of an upsurge of attacks by animal rights extremists. Cameron, who, as a neuroscientist uses animal experimentation, has been targeted. Cameron asks Lydia to act as a paid ghostwriter in the completion of his mother's book, Alchemist. Lydia agrees to the proposal and moves into Elizabeth's strange house, a triangular shaped studio on the banks of the Cam. Soon Lydia finds herself entangled, not only with Cameron, but also with a four-hundred year-old murder mystery, a network of 17th century alchemists and a ghostly figure intent on disrupting her work.

I've seen some reviews of Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk compare it to The DaVinci Code, but it's an extremely superficial comparison. Books about modern-day people who investigate mysteries from the past existed long before Dan Brown hammered out his infamous novel; he did not create a new genre.

In Ghostwalk, Lydia Brooke is asked by her ex-lover to ghostwrite the final chapters of an Isaac Newton biography that his late mother was writing. As she completes the work, Lydia finds the seventeenth century creeping into the present as mysterious deaths mirror the deaths of Newton's contemporaries.

It's not exactly a murder mystery; Ghostwalk focuses more on Lydia's own entanglements with her ex-lover and his dead mother than it does on the victims. The narration is lyrical; the entire novel is Lydia speaking to her ex-lover, referring to him in the second person. The result is dark, moody, and dreamy. There are also chunks of the Newton biography included, providing interesting details about the scientist's life.

Many other reviews mark it down for requiring a suspension of disbelief, but they seem to miss the point that this is a ghost story (did they not read the title?). I really enjoyed how subtly the two eras collide, and things were just creepy enough without being sensational. Ghostwalk is one of those impressive debut novels that makes one look forward to the author's next book.

Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

Reviewed by empressbrooke on Aug 1, 2007

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