The Bedlam Stacks

What an imagination author Natasha Pulley has!  I thought her first novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was an amazing steampunk novel (See my post of 9/25/15.), but in her new book The Bedlam Stacks (#690), she has created a fantastical nineteenth century Peru caught up in the middle of quinine wars in the search for new cinchona trees as its source.  I thought initially that this was an odd place to set such a wondrous novel until I remembered that one of my favorite literary characters came from deepest, darkest Peru - Paddington Bear - so maybe not such a stretch after all.


Merrick Tremayne has been badly injured in the service of the East India Company, running a smuggling operation for them in India and China. Now living in  the moldering wreck of the family home in Cornwall under his brother's grudging sufferance, he thinks he has no choice but to take up a post Charles has found for him.  With relations between the brothers strained due to Merrick's insistence that someone is moving around an impossibly heavy statue which their father brought back from Peru, Merrick is looking forward to going elsewhere.  That's when old naval acquaintance Sir Clements Markham shows up at their door to offer him a place on an expedition the East India Company is mounting to Peru.  His skills, despite his handicapped leg, are in demand for the job.  If he refuses, Merrick will never work for the Company again.  Soon Merrick finds himself aboard a ship to Peru, where, of course, nothing is as it seems...


There are elements of religion, botany, archaeology, cut-throat traders and just plain adventure here.  Merrick is continually finding links to his family's past in the outpost community of New Bethlehem, but in ways which seem scarcely believable.  But then, so many things about this community are odd. 


Both my husband and I were reminded of a recurring menace from the Dr. Who series.  If you read this book - and you should, it's lovely and lyrical as well as an exciting adventure - you'll know at once what I'm referencing here.  The joy of reading fiction is that everything doesn't have to be real in order to still ring true. I give The Bedlam Stacks a rare (for me!) five stars.