Tersias

A comet in the skies signals mysteries afoot – and possibly disaster to the superstitious: London in 1730 is a dangerous place, with many desperate and impoverished citizens, while those with power and wealth seek only to increase it. If you have a unique gift you are likely to attract unwelcome attention.

Tersias (with a name that recalls Ovid’s prophet, Tiresias) is blinded by his feckless mother to make him better begging fodder. The trauma kindles his gift of clairvoyance, conveyed through the frightening voices of the Wretchkin. He passes through many hands until he is caged by a dubious magician and failed alchemist, Magnus Malachi. When Malachi discovers Tersias’ ability, at first he demands that he prophesy only for himself. Soon, however, the temptation to make money by exhibiting Tersias – and charging others for the privilege of questioning him – grows too great.

Tersias comes to the attention of two of the city’s rivalrous powers, the sinister Lord Malpas and Solomon, who has founded a new ‘religion’, complete with craven followers, who have been drugged into submission. Vamana House, Malpas’ mansion in Thieving Lane, off the Strand, holds many secrets. Meanwhile, deep within The Citadel, his headquarters, Solomon has developed a lethal strain of locusts to unleash at his bidding.

Other less powerful figures in the city like Jonah, the young highwayman, and his friends from the Bull and Mouth inn, Tara and Maggot, are also seeking their fortunes. Soon the fates of all characters are entangled in a spider web of a plot, which binds them closer as they struggle variously to control or outwit each other. Tersias must tread a terrible path between possession by his inner voices and slavery to those who wish to exploit his gift.

Taylor has a powerful imagination, which engages directly with the darker side of life and humanity. He is unflinching in the face of human greeds and self-delusion in a narrative which gradually reveals the unrecognised and unmet spiritual needs which underlie them. The majority of his characters hunger for forms of illumination and transcendence, but they seek in the wrong places, relying on magical devices like Malpas’ alluring alabaster case or, in Solomon’s case, on the cynical manipulation of nature.

Tersias embroils the reader in a bleak world, which has much in common with the darker sides of our own. Help in the form of the healer, Lady Malpas and her followers, comes very late in the tale, but the story ultimately sweeps to a triumphant and redemptive close. This is a mesmerising fable, rich in linguistic as well as magical invention: Taylor powerfully animates an eighteenth-century London, which assaults the reader’s senses and chills the marrow.