Newton, history seep into modern mystery

HISTORICAL fiction is a conjuring act: Choose a dead hero and a few facts, sprinkle with period detail, add a pinch of speculation, wave your wand and poof! Ghosts walk, scheme, fight and fall in love. When the last page is turned, the spell is broken and the vivid characters fade back into their footnotes.

British author Rebecca Stott sees it differently, and her fiercely intelligent first novel may convince you too. “Ghostwalk” opens with the death of Elizabeth Vogelsang, a present-day Cambridge University historian found floating in the river at the bottom of her garden, a prism clutched in her hand. On her desk is an unfinished manuscript, an examination of Isaac Newton’s involvement in the clandestine network of 17th century alchemists. Her son, Cameron Brown, a celebrated neuroscientist, recruits his ex-lover, Lydia Brooke, to finish his mother’s book. Installed in Elizabeth’s odd little house, immersed in her work, Lydia discovers the heretical connections Elizabeth had drawn between Newton’s advancement and a string of suspicious deaths at Trinity College when he was a fellow. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s body seems to be one in a series of bodies turning up around Cambridge on the same dates as those in Newton’s time nearly 350 years before. To complicate matters, a radical cell of animal activists has targeted Cameron’s lab, threatening his colleagues and family with repeated acts of ritualized violence.

“Cambridge is just a palimpsest,” Elizabeth once told Lydia as they prowled the alleys of Stourbridge Fair. “Just one century laid upon another upon another. Nothing is ever quite lost while there are still a few old buildings standing sentinel. Time bleeds here, seeps, perhaps more than anywhere else in the city.” While walking to the library, Lydia glimpses a man in a red robe with long white hair. Newton? “There was a smudge around him. As if what I was seeing was something underneath the surface of my reality, as if someone had rubbed away the surface of my Cambridge,” Lydia marvels. History, Stott suggests, runs beneath the present, not dried up, but still flowing -- and occasionally oozing through.

Instead of a reanimated Newton dancing to the rhythm of a contemporary novelist’s imagination, we get something better: a carefully researched vision of Cambridge circa 1665; a peek at the great scholar’s obsessive genius as he explores the laws of light and a real set of deaths left unresolved. There’s nothing fanciful here; it’s all backed up with footnotes and a bibliography. Passages from Elizabeth’s book explore the art of glassmaking, Newton’s experiments with prisms, the politics of academic promotion. Stott then places her historical landscape in a fictional frame -- and lets her well-drawn contemporary characters become entangled in the past.

There are no spells, no secret passages. Instead Stott offers quantum mechanics to explain the resonance of past with present. Entanglement, as Cameron explains to Lydia, is a term used to describe the weird fact that when subatomic particles collide and move apart, “they retain a kind of connection.” Some physicists, he says, speculate that if “moments in time become entangled the way that photons become entangled, then there might be strange connections between the past and the present, moments in time acting in the same way, like the particles; one moment turns one way, the other follows -- shadowing.” Was Elizabeth’s death the work of a 17th century alchemist or a 21st century activist?

The separation of science from alchemy, of the material from the spiritual, is a 20th century conceit, Stott points out. Newton pursued both as a matter of course, but modern scientists have forgotten how. “Science doesn’t reduce things, or explain mysteries away,” Cameron says, “it just discovers stranger and stranger things.” Stott discards the lead-into-gold silliness and tries to restore alchemy to grandeur and mystery: “It had a rare beauty, this secret hybrid art made up of magic, chemistry, philosophy, hermetic thought, sacred geometry, and cosmology, a beauty in that passion to make things bloom into a fuller being,” Lydia thinks as she looks through the pages of Elizabeth’s manuscript.

Newton tried desperately to keep that passion pure, writing encoded lists of his own sins in an attempt to root them out. The complicated and convincing passion that drives Lydia and Cameron is for knowledge and for each other, inextricably. The alchemy of souls, the author seems to say, is part of the continuum of all matter. Boundaries we take for granted may not exist.

Stott has a way of fondling a word -- “to lie on, to lie under, to lie close, to lie in wait for” -- smearing its meaning to the point of bewilderment. Cambridge itself, “a city of keys and locked doors and private secret inner courtyards,” proves to be the perfect setting for such complexity and confusion.

But you won’t have time to reflect on Stott’s metaphysics, at least not on the first read -- you’ll be too eager to solve the murders. “Ghostwalk” works beautifully on both levels, leaving a lingering impression of a world richer, and more precarious, than we imagine.

Janice P. Nimura is a New York-based critic whose work also has appeared in Newsday, the New York Times and the Washington Post.