THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT

An independent scholar has an obsessive interest in the mysteries of Shakespeare’s identity, and the eponymous Elizabethan society somehow related to him.

Protagonist Sean Tallow works as a news editor for the BBC—until a cost-cutting decision sends him reeling through a succession of unfulfilling jobs and unresolved relationships with women, then a reunion with his boyhood friend Dan Pagett, a no-nonsense business tycoon who’s always been loftily amused by Sean’s stubborn bookishness. Wall (Bless the Thief, 1998) works hard at making connections between the intrigues that Dan involves Sean in (largely consisting of illegally circumventing customs regulations). But the most interesting parts of the story are those in which Sean uncovers information about the “School of Night” briefly mentioned in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost: an “underground” group of intellectuals whose members included poet-playwright Christopher Marlowe, scientist and mathematician Thomas Hariot, and that fascinating, tragic polymath Dr. John Dee (who might be considered the Elizabethan Aristotle). There’s authentic mystery in the buried facts about “this glittering cohort of human daring and folly,” self-proclaimed Faustian seekers who had abjured the company of women and devoted themselves to understanding all the secrets of the universe. Wall keeps us interested in Sean Tallow primarily because Tallow is interested in these people, and keeps stumbling onto such delicious possibilities as the suggestion that “King Lear was effectively a coded treatise on the subject of alchemy.” The novel’s contemporary plot—albeit intermittently enlivened by adultery, smuggling, murder, and malicious satire on academic and big-business posturing—pales by comparison (though Wall does make several intriguing climactic linkages between Dan Pagett’s bluff amorality and Sean Tallow’s entrapment in his very own “Jacobean tragedy”).

Thoughtful and interesting, if something less than a complete success. One hopes that more of this English-born Welsh author’s fiction will eventually arrive Over Here.