In Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts, an unlikely investigator delves into alleged ghost sightings in 18th-century England.
How did The Anatomy of Ghosts come about?
My agent asked if I'd ever thought of writing a ghost story. I said no, but the suggestion collided in my mind with the memory of a winter night in Cambridge, nearly 40 years ago, when there was a power cut, and the town and university was a place of darkness illuminated by the flickering flames of occasional candles, and there was an illusion of looking backwards through the centuries. Then came the vague idea of a murder mystery with a ghost set in the 18th century, when people thought rather differently about ghosts from the way they do now. The title came out of nowhere. And then I knew I had something that might eventually turn into a novel.
Did the book change much from the original idea?
All the original ideas survived in some shape or form. But as I was writing the book, other themes emerged. For example, I realized that on one level it's a book about the nature of grief, and what it is to be haunted. It took me a long time to get Holdsworth, the book-dealer-turned-sleuth, right, and he had to emerge in the writing, as opposed to the planning. Originally, the plot was far more complicated and there were many more characters. Writing became a process of refinement.
In what way did this book's period set the stage for what followed?
The late 18th-century was in many ways a watershed. The novel is set in 1786, between the American and French revolutions. Books are one of the themes—and the rise of reading was directly linked to the rise of the middle classes and the spread of ideas. Themes like ghosts and madness illustrate how culture was changing: Western culture was moving from an age of faith to an age of reason; people turned increasingly to empirical science when they needed explanations. It's the birth of the modern world.
Are there themes unifying your historical fiction?
I think so. One is that we need to understand the past if we are to understand the present. Another is that people who lived in the past are not simply ourselves in fancy dress: they carry different psychological baggage with them. A third—and this runs through all my novels—is that it's very hard to make simplistic judgments about people. Finally, the past isn't something to be nostalgic about—in many cases, quite the reverse.
