Product Description

Dr Courtine, an unworldly academic is visiting an old friend in the Cathedral town of Thurchester in the late 1870s. On his first night he is told the story of the town ghost, a legend deeply mired in the medieval intrigues of the Cathedral when two prominent churchmen met their deaths in unexplained circumstances. The story of dark deeds in the ancient close captures Courtine's donnish imagination, and he is also embarking on some amateur sleuthing of his own - attempting to track down an elusive 11th century manuscript to prove his theories about the life of King Alfred. Suitably distracted, Courtine becomes the unwitting witness to a terrible crime committed on his own doorstep ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83088 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Customer Reviews

The Triumphant Return of the Victorian Novel
Charles Palliser is the author who brought the Victorian novel out of the drawing room with The Quincunx, a fast-paced novel of adventure and intrigue.

With The Unburied, however, he takes us back into the drawing room...literally. Much of this book involves fireside conversation over sherry or port, and much of it moves at a pace that would make writers such as Dickens and George Eliot proud.

At first glance, The Unburied seems to be no more than a ghost story, and it is certainly atmospheric, filled as it is with all the spookiness and gloom one usually finds only in the Gothic form of the genre. Palliser, however, deviates somewhat from a standard thriller as he leads us down first one unexpected path, then another.

The book centers on the character of Dr. Edward Courtine, an academic who has come to the English town of Thurchester to visit an old acquaintance. Courtine gradually learns the details of a murder at the local cathedral more than two centuries earlier and of a ghost that some still believe to haunt the area. Courtine, however, hasn't come to Thurchester to hunt ghosts; he has come to look for a lost book about Alfred the Great. So great is his preoccupation with his search, in fact, that he overlooks what the reader can see quite clearly: all of the townsfolk are acting as if they had something to hide.

It is at this point that the unexpected paths make their first appearance. Unexpected paths, red herrings, false clues, the reader really doesn't know what to make of this story. Is the centuries old murder the book's focal point or is it, instead, the murder that has just been committed? Perhaps it both.

Palliser cleverly uses a recently revealed manuscript as a framing device and proceeds to tell his tale in the first-person, with Courtine as the narrator. The story is rewoven many times and readers who fail to pay attention will find themselves at a loss.

The Unburied unfolds in a typically slow Victorian fashion as Courtine embarks on a personal journey, addressing old wounds and looking towards a newly bright future. There is a lot of exposition is this book, but that is all to the good and Palliser has succeeded in creating one of those dark, brooding and intensely atmospheric Victorian novels that he, himself, loves so very much. Some readers, however, may find this frustrating. The Quincunx balanced its nineteenth century setting with a sense of urgency about the plot; The Unburied takes its time as gaslights, fog, architecture and landscape come to be regarded almost as characters in their own right.

By the time we near the end of this amazing book, we begin to wonder if this is a story of murders long ago or ghosts that still walk. Or is it even more? Is it an exploration of the things that can, and often do, haunt a man internally? The answer is something that each reader will have to decide for himself, for this is certainly an ambitious work.

The Unburied is a book for mystery lovers and for non-mystery lovers alike. Anyone who enjoys a well-constructed novel written with meticulous care and detail will find this book time well spent.

Flat? Drawbacks? No way - this is a great book!
A terrific, thoughtful and deeply engaging mystery, this book completely tangles you into the gothic, foggy, deceptive world it describes. I've rarely read something so exceptionally well-crafted and intelligent. Moreover, it's not the pretentious, associative rambling that often passes for 'literary' writing, but tightly focussed story and characterisation. The narrator is sometimes half-informed, or untrustworthy, or disoriented - that's the point, the reader has to do some work to discover what's going on! So refreshing to have to engage with a work and really think about what's happening on a myriad of levels. This book makes you puzzle over themes of history, story-telling, reliable narration, constructing truth from what we see and read and hear, but all in a completely involving way. And that's one lesson you come away with, and made me go straight back to the beginning of the book: narrative curiosity and that itching hunger to find out the truth are what makes us read and learn and basically get out and live. This book is wonderful precisely because it plays games and infuriates and makes you go backward and forward - and anyone who considers themselves a reader of crime, historical fiction or 'literature' should give this a go and see what the novel form can still do.

Worth reading more than once
I thoroughly enjoyed this work. thw writer is extremely intelligent and his half Gothic half murder mystery novel touched on a lot of themes. Whereas for me with most murder mysteries I cannot be interested enough to work out who might be the murderer, this novel like Dostoyevsky's uses a whodunnit theme to investigate a number of subjects-faith, the nature of evil and the nature of history or historical truth and keeps interest in the entire mystery alive. What I found frustrating was that I was not so far able to concentrate as to be able to unravel all they mystery of the book even after a second read. The writer cleverely evokes the atmosphere of the time, although I think he occasionally slips in the dioalogue, which once or twice ocmes across as not quite period.

I felt that I must be a bit stupid (I am slow on the uptake about people and their motivations in real life) and the book can have a depressing effect in the sense that the normal reader may feel he/she is rather dim witted compared to the author. But how refreshing to find an intelligent novel, a novel from which one can learn something, a novel which is both an excape and not an escape, that is to say an escape into a foggy Gothic world which enthralls and at the same time a discussion of subjects which are contemporary (what is historical truth is a very very hot subject-consider the Shakespeare authorship debate and the reassessment of historical figures such as Richard 111 for example) a novel which is worth reading twice or even three times and for that reason is worth its price more than most novels.

If you you like at least two of these writers I think you will like this book: Umberto Eco/Mervyn Peake/ Agatha Christi/Brontes