Remarkable Creatures: So....how do new front-of-store novels stand up to the authonomy scrutiny?

Bestselling novelist, Tracy Chevalier, is a fan of authonomy.com - and a supporter the new up and coming talent emerging from the site. She's keen to know how the top 5 talent spotters from last month received her own script, Remarkable Creatures, set to be published in the UK next week. Here, top talent spotter, John Booth, gives us his review.



"There is a robust market for fictionalised accounts of the lives of real people and Tracy Chevalier's new book is a significant entry in that genre. Her book tells the story of two remarkable women, Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, over the first few decades of the nineteenth century. It is about friendship as much as fossil hunting and shows how a common interest can transcend differences of class.

Mary Anning was to achieve considerable fame and notoriety as a fossil hunter at a time when nobody was sure what fossils were. Being both a woman and of humble stock she was never granted the recognition for her work that a man would have achieved. Elizabeth Philpot was her friend and mentor, a lady of leisure who accepts her spinster status as rather agreeable and chooses to take up fossil hunting as her hobby of choice. Mary hunts fossils as a business from her childhood, much as someone might forage for edible roots to sell in the market.

This book is a sedate and comfortable read, immersing the reader in the gentile world of Elizabeth more than it does the gritty world of the poor of the time. Given the focus on the story of the discovery of fossils and the two women's enduring friendship this is inevitable.

It is impossible to see inside the head of anyone. The cultural mores of a society two hundred years gone are lost to us forever. We can establish 'facts' as they are written down and read the correspondence that survives, but this is merely a sketch at best and we impose our own philosophies on their writings unconsciously as we interpret the facts they have left us.

For all of that, Tracy Chevalier has created a living breathing recreation of the early nineteenth century. It isn't a complete picture of that world anymore than a description of life in Eton School today would reflect English education in the early twenty-first century, but it is believable and holistic. We are drawn seamlessly into a time where the views of churchmen and rich amateurs carry as much weight as those who apply the scientific method or even deductive reasoning.

Born before Darwin and in her grave before the publication of Origin of Species, Mary Anning provided important parts of the data that would lead Darwin to his great theory of evolution. It is good to seen her resurrected and imbued with life and character on the 150th anniversary of that book."

John Booth, 6 August 2009