Remarkable Creatures

If you're not familiar with Library Thing, it is a book social networking site and if you have an account, you can sign up for their Early Readers program, where there is basically a lottery for review copies of upcoming books. I managed to score and advanced reading copy of Tracy Chevalier's new novel, Remarkable Creatures.

If you're not familiar with Tracy Chevalier, you might be familiar with a little work called Girl With a Pearl Earring, which was made into a movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. I haven't read the book but did enjoy the movie, and so Remarkable Creatures was my first adventure with Chevalier's writing.

I could not put this book down.

Set in the early 1800s, Elizabeth Philpot and two of her sisters are exiled from London to the seaside town of Lyme Regis when their brother decides to marry. Each of them settling into spinsterhood in her own way, Elizabeth takes up the hunting of fossils in the cliffs and beaches surrounding the time. While she does this, she meets a girl named Mary Anning, who comes from an impoverished working class family barely scraping by, but who depend on the discovery of fossils for their livelihood, as they sell them to tourists and collectors. A relationship builds between the two, and eventually Mary and her brother discover something in the cliffs that will change the world: the skeleton of a prehistoric creature eventually to become known as ichthyosaurus.

In this pre-Darwinian time, such a discovery is met with both suspicion and derision by the God-fearing citizens of Lyme Regis, but it sets the scientific community on fire. Both Mary and Elizabeth, though they are the local experts in the hunting, extraction, and mounting of these fossils, not to mention have speculative minds that are asking the pertinent questions of the time and who are the most well-read and knowledgeable on the subject of the fossils in general, are excluded from any scientific discussion because they are mere women. Mary also has the disadvantage of being not only female, but of extremely low birth, whereas Elizabeth comes from money and has had far more opportunity and learning. But each woman, in her own way, forges a unique path through her gender and class limitations.

There is a lot of stuff going on in this novel. Not only are there class and gender issues, but this story also examines that fascinating time when science was just, just starting to make people question long-held belief systems. Mary and Elizabeth were challenging those beliefs in their own small ways, but what Mary Anning discovered on the beach that day - and kept discovering for many years afterward - influenced science and religion and philosophy like nothing else previously. It might have brought out the best in some people, but it also brought the worst out in many more.

Also central to this story is the friendship between Mary and Elizabeth - indeed, it is the central part of the story. This was very beautifully and poignantly conveyed by the author, and for both women, this friendship was as life-changing as Mary's incredible fossil discoveries. And just as these two women endeavoured to stretch beyond the boundaries set by their culture and society, they also discovered that their relationship was key to not only their personal growth, but also to their struggle against the odds set against them.

The title is very apt; not only did Mary and Elizabeth hunt remarkable creatures on the beaches and cliffs around Lyme Regis, but they were also remarkable women in their own right. Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot were real people, as were most of the characters in the novel, and though this is a fictional account of their experiences, it was very cool for me to superimpose this story on actual historical events. Mary Anning did change the world and was a trailblazer, and I'd like to think that Elizabeth Philpot was indeed right along side her, spunky and outspoken and supportive, the two of them blazing a trail together.

Great book; a definite recommend.