"The Leviathan" by Rosie Andrews

The Leviathan

by Rosie Andrews

She is awake. And I must remind myself of how it began. The end of all things. It was a time of witches, it was a time of saints, a time when rabbits hunted foxes, when children came into the world without their heards, and kings lost theirs on the scaffold. The world was turned upside down, or so some said… now, less than a hundred years after men and magic began to drift apart, we walk a new earth. We have become reasonable, and cleave to our certainties as once we cleaved to our kings. Now, the buried stories are dismissed as old wives’ tales, exaggerations, falsehoods. But still they bubble through the cracks, clinging on, refusing to go down into the dark. They develop strange qualities, words stored for too long. In the dim light of my small study, never bright enough now, I lay them down in honest black ink, but they are past their bloom…

Rosie Andrews’ debut novel The Leviathan opens with a brief prologue set in 1703 – the work’s “present”, to which we will return at regular intervals in the novel.  It then immediately takes us back six decades, to the final days of the year 1643, where the main storyline is set. 

Narrator Thomas Treadwater, a soldier in the English Civil War, receives a barely credible letter from his younger sister Esther, alleging that their pious widower father is being seduced by one of the servants, “the harlot Chrissa Moore”, and urging him to come home without delay to the family farmstead in Norfolk.  Thomas returns to find the farm animals dead, his father struck down with a debilitating stroke, and Chrissa and another servant jailed on suspicions of witchcraft.  Thomas is a (relatively) learned man of his age, and is losing his faith in God, let alone his beliefs in witchcraft and old-fashioned superstition.   But it will soon appear that truth is not a matter of black and white. Thomas’s beliefs – or lack thereof – will be sorely tested.

At this early stage in the novel, I was wondering where the narrative would lead.  Would Andrews follow an Ann-Radcliffe-style “rational Gothic” and eventually show us how the charges of witchcraft were trumped up by a superstitious mob? Or would this turn out to be a work of supernatural fiction?    I would not like to reveal much about the pleasurable twists and turns of the plot, but suffice it to say that The Leviathan turns out to be an unsettling piece of Gothic horror and that, yes, the evils it portrays are not (only) of this world.

The destruction of Leviathan. Gustave Doré (1832-83), artist. H. Pisan, engraver. 1866. 

The Leviathan is an exciting and gripping yarn which, despite its surprises, does not require much suspension of disbelief (naturally, within the parameters of a speculative novel).  The narrative juggles ably between the “past” and “present” timelines until the satisfactory ending.  The language used is archaic enough to give a sense of authenticity, without, however, making it any less flowing to the modern reader.  

That same sense of authenticity is reflected in details which, albeit not essential to the plot, serve to create atmosphere.  In one scene, for instance, we witness the preparation of the evening meal of snipe; in others we get descriptions of an England ravaged by plague and civil war and a hint of the religious debates which were still fresh following the relatively recent upheaval brought about by the Reformation.  This ability to provide “context” is surely the result of a good mix of research and imagination – the sights, smells and sounds of a distant era are well conveyed.   The novel also raises interesting themes, such as faith, belief and doubt – although this is done with a much lighter touch than the “theological Gothic” of, say, Sarah Perry’s Melmoth.     

Poet John Milton appears as a character in the novel, in the unlikely role of paranormal investigator.   At one point he observes:

It has always been my weakness: a novel story, well constructed. I must congratulate you on the telling.

This could well sum up my reaction to this engaging debut.

Hardcover, 320 pages

Expected publication: February 17th 2022 by Raven Books

St Benet's Abbey, Norfolk by John Sell Cotman (1783-1842)