The Warlow Experiment
A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the best books of 2019 by the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times (London), and the BBC
An utterly transporting and original historical novel about an eighteenth-century experiment in personal isolation that yields unexpected--and deeply, shatteringly human--results.
"The best kind of historical fiction. Alix Nathan is an original, with a virtuoso touch."
--Hilary Mantel
Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science--something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house, fitted out with rugs, books, paintings, and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter. The solitude will be totally unrelieved by any social contact whatsoever; the subject will keep a diary of his daily thoughts and actions. The pay: fifty pounds per annum, for life.
Only one man is desperate to apply for the job: John Warlow, a semi-literate laborer with a wife and six children to provide for. The experiment, a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad, will have unforeseen consequences for all included.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nathan's intriguing yet overlong U.S. debut tracks what happens after an experiment in late-18th-cenutry Wales goes awry. In 1793, the wealthy Herbert Powyss, seeking to "contribute something important to the sphere he so admired: natural philosophy, science," devises an experiment to have a man live in total isolation for seven years in chambers deep under Powyss's Welsh estate. The incentive is 50 per year for life, and only one man applies: the semiliterate, working-class John Warlow. Warlow is given ample comforts the same food that Powyss eats (delivered via dumbwaiter) and any book he desires. But Warlow has little interest in reading and can barely write in the journal he's supposed to keep; he's more interested in the frogs he finds in his chambers. Complications further ensue when Powyss develops an affection for Hannah, Warlow's wife. Naturally, the experiment doesn't go as planned, but the novel never picks up a full head of steam, instead remaining largely static narratively and devoting ample page space to the servants on the estate. There are provocative wrinkles such as whether it's an inevitability that Powyss was going to hate the man he is experimenting on but the story takes too long to get where it's going and doesn't fully land once it does. Nathan's novel never fully lives up to its promising premise.
