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DAMN TOWNIES...
Recently my wife and I went out for date
night and attended a free performance by the
UGA Symphony Orchestra, then went for some
tasty burgers at Clocked, saw a great band at
Flicker, and ended up having a nightcap at
the Go Bar. It was, all in all, a deeply satisfy
ing evening, one of many that we've spent
moving between the worlds of the University
and downtown. In the last year we've gone
to see Noh performers, watched our fine local
burlesque troupe, pub-crawled with zombies,
attended lectures and openings and juried
exhibitions, seen some great community the
ater, eaten very well and discovered musicians
and musicians and musicians...
I say it often in this column (and yet not
often enough), and the beginning of the UGA
school year is a perfect time to reiterate:
Athens is a wonderful place to live whether
you're here for school or here for life. Unlike
a lot of other college towns, which seem to
be mere parking lots for their institutions of
higher learning, over the years our town has
struck a vital balance between the offerings
of the university and
the vibrant life of town
itself. On any given
day or night there's a
dozen or so things to
do, all of which beat
mall-trolling or binge
drinking at the house.
All you need do is seek
them out (the hippie
socialist rag you're
holding now is a good
place to look).
While there are
many townies who
won't venture through
the Arch and many
students who refuse
to travel west of Hull
Street, the opportuni
ties are always there.
This was not the case
not too terribly long
ago. There was a time
when a university was a gated enclave, an
exclusive preserve of the sons of the upper
classes as they prepared to take their places
as lords and masters over the rabble circulat
ing about the other side of the walls. Town
existed to provide for "gown," but the two
worlds were off-limits to one another. Such
is the portrait "Elizabeth Garner presents of
Oxford University, the setting of her remark
able novel The Ingenious Edgar Jones
(Random House, 2009).
William Jones considers himself blessed
in his rise from orphaned kitchen-brat to his
current job as an Oxford porter (a glorified
night watchman), in his marriage to former
tavern-wench Eleanor, and in the impend
ing birth of their child. The child is born one
night in 1847, his arrival coinciding with a
meteor shower, as if the skies themselves
are announcing his presence. But the boy is
strange from the moment he draws breath, a
leathery baby with a ridge of stiff hair down
his spine. Young Edgar is wild and inquisitive,
looking to escape even before he can walk,
and getting into everything. His feral disposi
tion is matched by his unwillingness to speak
and, after he finally does, in his inability to
learn to read. Eleanor despairs of her child
and soon so does the more amiable William. It
seems that nothing can be done for the boy,
even after William gains an audience with a
professor of physiology, who proclaims the
boy's affliction to be "bad blood."
But Edgar is much more clever than any
one around him realizes. His explorations and
insatiable curiosity have given him an acute
insight into how things work and are put
together, and at seven he apprentices himself
to the local blacksmith, where he learns how
the pieces of iron that hold the world together
are forged. When a controversial professor of
anatomy asks the smith for help in building a
contraption for his experiments, it's Edgar who
figures out how to do it, and soon the boy is
working for the professor on the most ambi
tious project the university has seen in an
age, the building of a natural history museum,
a monument to the emergence of the sciences
from beneath the cloud of religion.
The museum will be the battleground
between Oxford's old guard and a new breed
of scholars determined to break God's myster
ies wide open, but for Edgar all that matters
is the building, the blossoming of the archi
tecture, and the song of the iron. His father,
however, is not so
sanguine—not only
does this new edifice
fly in the face of every
thing he has always
believed about man's
relationship with God's
creation, but when
Edgar is callously dis
missed by his patron,
William finds a growing
rage within himself
against the university
and its so-called bet
ter class of men. Edgar
has his own grudges
going, and when he is
apprenticed to Oxford
Town's resident inven
tor, he acquires the
skills to enact a terrible
vengeance on the men
who tossed him aside.
All of these forces come
together on one ill-fated night with cataclys
mic results and disastrous consequences.
Garner has put together a great novel here,
Dickensian in atmosphere and sentiment, but
with an ability to make the period seem imme
diate that one finds in the work of Susanna
Clarke and Neil Gaiman. While it's by no means
a steampunk novel, fans of that genre will find
the iron and smoke, clockwork and gadgetry of
the age quite comfortable. Garner imbues her
characters with life and subtlety, and not the
least of these characters is Oxford itself. The
book is a love song to the university, with its
spires and gargoyles and old stone steeped in
history, which she renders in deep, affection
ate detail.
The ending of the book may surprise some
readers—one critic called it "a late lunge
into magical realism"—but I find the ending
completely in keeping with the rest of the
novel, with its constant supply of wonders in
a time when wonders were about to become
commonplace, when reason was on che brink
of becoming the dominant force in academia
and the world beyond, and when the divide
between the cloisters of learning and the rest
of unwashed humanity first began to crumble.
It was an exciting time, and The Ingenious
Edgar Jones is a story worthy of it.
John G. Netties
The
Ingenious
O
Edgar Jones
O
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