Book review: The Burial Plot, by Elizabeth Macneal - 'an admirable and deeply enjoyable novel'

Set in a convincingly imagined Victorian London, Elizabeth Macneal’s third novel may offer a degree of escapism but it is also a penetrating study of human nature, writes Allan Massie

Elizabeth Macneal’s third novel, set in 1839, may be called Victorian Gothic though happily it is free of the characteristically Gothic features such as monks and haunted castles. Indeed, starting with urban squalor with low life criminals, attempted rape, apparent murder, gambling and rat-killing terriers, it threatens at first to echo the Tyburn novels of Bulwer Lytton and the young Harrison Ainsworth. Yet it is, happily, more ambitious, even to the extent of making me think of the greatest Victorian crime or mystery novel, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins – a book which unlike almost all crime fiction bears, and indeed rewards several re-readings, although admirable and deeply enjoyable as Macneal’s novel is, her villain scarcely matches the magnificent Count Fosco.

It has, however, a very engaging heroine named Bonnie, “twenty-one, as green and pretty as an apple.” Having fled the threat of marriage to a lecherous Parson, she is now in London, where she is taken up by a criminal pair of gamblers, Crawford and Rex, the former becoming her lover. It is a time when London, with its rapidly growing population, is running out of burial grounds, and Crawford, an intelligent young man, sees a fortune to be made in the cemetery business but has no capital. Then Bonnie finds herself in trouble from which she is rescued by Crawford and Rex, but left in fear of arrest. They produce an advertisement for a job as a lady’s maid in a grand house and tell her she will be safe there. Doubtfully, she does as they suggest.

It's a fine house – Macneal says she had Horace Walpole’s Strawberry House in mind – but strangely free of staff, only a cook and aged butler. Its owner, Mr Moncrieff, is a lonely widower, a gloomy man who once had ambitions to be an architect; he is also threatened with bankruptcy. His wife may have killed herself, may have been murdered. This is a fine set-up; something is seriously wrong. Then Crawford appears, introducing himself as Bonnie’s brother. There is something suspicious about his knowledge of the house. Then he suggests to Moncrieff that he can rescue his fortune by creating a great cemetery in his grounds; he may even realize his artistic dreams in doing so. Of course, nothing is quite what it seems, and the novel turns dark.

Elizabeth Macneal

This is all splendid stuff. There are villains and there is mystery. The descriptions of house, grounds and the Thames country are admirable. The characters are engaging and the plot is admirably developed. It may also be called a study in megalomania, but which character is afflicted with this is not revealed for some time. There is a pleasing depiction of guilt and innocence, but who is guilty? And who innocent? Bonnie is a thoroughly engaging heroine, by no means a plaster saint.

This kind of novel makes for easy reading, even though the plot is sufficiently twisting to demand the reader’s concentration. It is an accomplished pastiche period piece, at times more bluntly spoken than was permitted a Victorian novelist, and there is a lively and genuinely Victorian awareness of social difference, what was permitted for some but refused to others. It is well researched – Macneal is good on clothes, jewellery, furniture, food and drink – that is to say on the sort of things that give body to a novel.

A complaint often directed at a novel set in history (not necessarily the same thing as a historical novel) is that it offers only escapism. Well, setting aside the fact that we all need some form of escapism from time to time, it’s not one that can be fairly directed at this book. Human nature doesn’t change, only the circumstances that surround us. Elizabeth Macneal has written a novel which, while offering a welcome escape from the times we live in, also presents aspects of human behaviour which are true to all time. I think it even better that its predecessor, Circus of Wonders, which enjoyed deserved success.

The Burial Plot, by Elizabeth Macneal, Picador, £18.99