The Technologists, by Matthew Pearl, reviewed by Alison Neale…
I’m very envious. If you’ve not come across Matthew Pearl before, you have four fabulous novels ahead of you, while I have to sit and drum my fingers until he writes another. Is there anything as wonderful as ‘discovering’ a new author? Not a first-timer – fine in itself, but once the book is finished, that’s it. They may never write again. No, an author with a backlist; an author whose work will keep you going for weeks, possibly months.
I’m not sure how well known the American Pearl is in the UK. I came upon his first novel in a sparsely stocked import bookshop while living abroad. I had read through the large suitcase of books I had lugged with me and was craving more. Imagine, though, an airport bookshop the wrong side of check-in: limited stock of the quick-fix variety – fine for a day on the beach, but no real substance. I needed something engrossing: Green & Black’s 85% cocoa, if you will, rather than a Kinder Surprise. Then an intriguing spine caught my eye, and I pulled out The Dante Club. I was back at the shop a week later, despite the two mad, life-threatening taxi rides across a sprawling city to get there, to see if they had another one … Yes, my name is Alison and I’m a book addict. There are many reasons I came back to the UK, but well-stocked bookshops on my doorstep is certainly one of them!
There are perhaps four or five authors whose books I buy the day they come out, in hardback, without even reading the blurb. Pearl’s latest novel, The Technologists, justifies my faith in the author yet again.
His novels take certain real people and events and then weave a clever, well-researched and intricate fiction around them. Previous books have examined the strange death of Edgar Allan Poe, unravelling his mysterious last days (The Poe Shadow), and possible solutions to the ending of Charles Dickens’s last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (The Last Dickens).
While the first three novels had literary themes, however, The Technologists is rather different. Set in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1868, a few years after the end of the Civil War, this time the subject is the rivalry between the newly opened Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT – and the old-school Harvard University. Concerns of the day that the ‘technologists’ would bring about the fall of mankind with their newfangled gas lighting and machinery seem to be justified by a series of extraordinary and devastating events, one of which opens the novel. For while the unions protest at their potential replacement by robots, others are plotting to use the Institute’s own sciences and technologies against it.
A small band of students realise that the events are far from accidental or natural. These include – gasp! – a woman scientist, who is only allowed to attend the Institute on the condition that she works away by herself down in the basement. They combine their varying skills and knowledge – despite their differences of opinion – to find out who is behind the plot, in the realisation that the otherwise inevitable closure of the Institute will ruin their lives.
In the words of Blackadder (if I recall correctly), this is a ‘rip-roaring roller coaster of a novel’, ending with an exciting battle of wits and physique.
There’s even a little bit of romance.