A Victorian Tale of Puzzles Within Puzzles

It has become a genre of its own--the neo-Victorian or faux-medieval mystery novel--and Charles Palliser (“The Quincunx”) has taken it to a new degree of elaboration in “The Unburied,” a tale as spired and gargoyled as the cathedral that looms over much of the action.

The title refers to the legend that ghosts are people who were never properly buried, and ghosts abound in the town of Thurchester, where murders committed during the English Civil War are still discussed two centuries later. In another sense, though, everything in this novel is buried layers deep, and reading it is like taking part in an archeological dig.

In the framing story, set in 1919, Philip Barthram has realized the significance of events he fleetingly witnessed as a schoolboy in Thurchester. An elderly banker, James Stonex, was slain there in 1882. Barthram has unknowingly held clues to this classic locked-room mystery, which has inspired speculation ever since.

Other clues have also been provided by Edward Courtine, who visited Thurchester at the time of Stonex’s murder to search for a biography of King Alfred the Great in the cathedral library. Courtine left behind a manuscript, unsealed after his death, which confirms Barthram’s suspicion that an innocent man was accused of the crime.

Barthram journeys to Geneva to interview a 90-year-old woman who knows who the real killer was. She admits nothing, however--and we don’t know what Barthram knows about her. Palliser keeps us hanging until we have read the “Courtine Account,” which takes up the bulk of the novel.

In 1882, Courtine is invited to foggy, provincial Thurchester by Austin Fickling, an old Cambridge chum whose career has foundered on the shoals of drink and (the author indicates with period delicacy) homosexuality. For 20 years, Courtine has blamed Fickling for introducing his wife to the man she ran off with. Only now is he willing to believe that Fickling didn’t mean to betray him.

“Betrayals,” in fact, was the title of Palliser’s second novel, and if he hadn’t already used it, it would have served nicely here. Betrayal is the theme of this book’s telescoping puzzles, from Stonex’s murder to the question of whether 12th century accounts of the life of the 9th century King Alfred are forgeries, panegyrics or the truth.

Courtine is not always a reliable narrator. He is a sentimentalist, sometimes arrogant, sometimes obtuse. His blunders, though, can be fruitful: A wrongheaded order he gives to cathedral workers causes damage that reveals the corpse of one of the 17th century victims--unburied indeed. And he is able, particularly in regard to Fickling’s real motives for inviting him, to learn from his mistakes.

We can only admire how Palliser has put this thing together--the gaslit or torch-lit atmosphere; the ecclesiastical politicking that reminds us of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels; the way in which, for each mystery, one solution after another is offered, only to prove false or incomplete.

The very efficiency of “The Unburied,” however, is proof that it’s not an actual Victorian novel. A Trollope or a Dickens or a Wilkie Collins would find it impossible to subordinate everything else to puzzle-solving. The characters would spill over the boundaries of their plot-required functions; the social and political issues of the time would have life on their own, rather than being (like a corpse) shrunken and mummified, however perfectly preserved.