WHEN Charles Darwin studied at the University of Edinburgh in the 1820s, one of his professors, Robert Jameson, firmly believed in the fixity of species, while another was a closet follower of transmutation, Lamarck’s revolutionary theory of how one species can change into another.
This intellectual debate drives the new novel by science historian Rebecca Stott. Set in the turbulent Paris of 1815 after the fall of Napoleon – whose deportation punctuates the narrative – the protagonist is a student of Jameson’s who is dispatched to the city to study with the great Georges Cuvier, a fierce critic of transmutation. En route, his papers and specimens, including fossil corals, are stolen by a mysterious female transmutationist, who eventually embroils him in underworld dealings, ending in a shoot-out in the quarries beneath Paris. An enjoyable, atmospheric and carefully researched yarn.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson