The Undying of Obedience Wellrest

This story starts in great style, with a countryside cemetery at midnight scene set in the past quite as good as the famous opening chapter of John Meade Falkner’s classic Moonfleet.  What follows is an equally spirited tale involving grave-robbing, theft, and a planned abduction. This is all revealed via a series of convenient eaves-droppings as young Obedience, usually known as Bede, discovers how her father is scheming to marry her off. This would be to Phineas, a sinister scientist stranger with an artificial nose. This dastardly plan is foiled with the help of Ned, a working-class boy her own age with a most useful pet fly named Mosca.

So far, so Gothic, with Phineas constructing a working laboratory where he eventually hopes to discover the secret of life itself. But in an interesting twist, Bede also has ambitions in that direction, having previously built her own secret laboratory. Unknown to Ned, she too has been conducting experiments on newly dead bodies. Both she and Phineas are searching for the final clue to eternal life, but this can only be found in papers buried in the tomb of Bede’s disgraced alchemist ancestor Herbert.

All this is exciting enough, but ‘less is more’ still works even in full Gothic narratives and the final chapters are so over the top that credibility is stretched to breaking point. Bowling having been so well in charge of his plotting increasingly runs the risk of allowing it to become too much in charge of him as he rushes towards an attempted resolved conclusion. When Ned’s supposed grandfather rides away at the end still alive despite receiving multiple bullet holes he takes with him any hope of still believing in this up to now gripping and expertly told very tall story.