THE RESURRECTIONIST

A man is offered a fortune to illegally excavate a body for scientific research in the second novel by screenwriter Scheuring (The Far Shore, 2017), who co-wrote the 2003 film A Man Apart.

In 1820, professional anatomists in England had a vexing problem: They had an intense desire to understand the human body but a chronic undersupply of cadavers to autopsy. This created an unusual partnership between respectable physicians and unseemly grave robbers, euphemistically referred to as resurrectionists. Scheuring deftly captures its peculiar nature in an author’s note: “A more antithetical set of bedfellows I cannot imagine, especially in England, with its rigid class structures: the university-educated doctor of high station conspiring with the brutish, illiterate criminal of such compromised moral standing that he would breach hallowed convention, steal from the Lord’s own soil, and traffic in the sludge and decay of rotting corpses.” Job Mowatt is one such resurrectionist, desperately trying to build a better life for his daughter, Ivy, both beautiful and brilliant, her future sure to be stymied by the “trappings of station” if he can’t raise enough money for her education. Then, an opportunity arises: Job is offered an “astronomical” sum of money to unearth the body of Ella Beddoe, the wife of Marcus Beddoe, a powerful and dangerous man. The offer is made by Dr. Percival Quinn, “one of the most learned anatomists in all of London,” and not just out of thirst for scientific knowledge. His wife, Neva, is pregnant but, due to prior illness, is unlikely to survive the delivery, and he hopes studying Ella’s body—she was pregnant at the time of her death—will provide the clues that saves his wife.

Scheuring does a masterful job of juxtaposing two typically incongruent worlds, glittering high society and the soiled underbelly of the poor. Ivy exists on the border of those worlds—destitute by a socio-economic accident of birth but also blessed with the looks and brains to rise above her lot. And despite the great social distance between Job and Percival, both men exist primarily to protect the loved ones who face grave danger, a comparison drawn by the author with impressive subtlety and power. Moreover, Scheuring provocatively raises questions not only about the gruesome work of resurrectionism, but of the lust for science that demands it and how scientific procedures are themselves implicated in a dark dehumanization. Consider this chilling depiction of the anatomy of a human body: “Another hallmark moment: the first violation. When a student must take blade to a body and cut away what heretofore had been critical to life and dispose of it as if it were nothing more than table scraps. When the body goes from the virgin, inviolable province of the human soul to a work-thing of science, an assembly of disparate, inanimate, investigative possibilities.” This is a bracing, remarkable work. Both historically astute and grippingly dramatic, it implicitly raises questions about the human cost of saving human lives and of the potential degradation wrought by a science meant to elevate humanity to a higher plane of civilization.

A thrilling historical drama, thoughtful and emotionally poignant.