Sparks of Bright Matter is a novel combining descriptions of 18th century London with rural Ireland, the search for a missing object of importance and some unusual characters.
Sparks of Bright Matter is a book that quickly gets down to business. At the start of the novel, Peter Woulfe is a young apprentice chemist working in Georgian London, earning a basic wage and getting by. However, in his spare time he is obsessed with alchemy which he works on in his room.
Peter is given the task of delivering a book – the Mutus Liber – to a customer. He sets off with good intentions but upon meeting Sukie, a prostitute and a thief, he loses the book. The consequences of this are dramatic, for the book has secrets that others are willing to kill for. Whilst the book’s main plot is about the hunt for the book, until about halfway through the novel, the plot mainly focuses on things around this plot device.
We also spend time discovering details about Sukie, perhaps the most likeable character in the book. She finds the book and keeps it hoping to sell it for profit but realising that it may be worth more than she is willing to give.
On the first page we find that Peter is not a particularly nice young man. Obsessed with his studies and not someone who gets on well with others, his first action in the book is to throw something at Mal, his assistant, for disturbing his train of thought and seemingly killing him.
This unfortunate accident leaves Peter abandoning Mal’s body on the city streets – dead bodies on the streets are not too uncommon in London at this time, it seems. The author fills the book with grim descriptions of squalor and unpleasantness, with prostitution and gin palaces all over the poorer parts of London.
As the book progresses we are told much of how Peter got to where he is now through backstory – his upbringing in rural Ireland, in a village where the mysterious witch Bridie lives, his apprenticeship in France and Europe and then in London, where he sees events related to the Jacobite rebellion. This Irish element of the story by comparison with urban London is also not easy, but seems somewhat gentler.
Much of the work is readable and makes the pages turn. However, there were elements I had issues with. Firstly, although the main characters are detailed, I couldn’t help but dislike some elements of them, The biggest issue here was Peter, who I felt I was meant to get to like by the end of the novel, but whom actually I really disliked. Sukie is more likable, yet even so would not be a person I wanted to meet, never mind want to find out more about. Other (admittedly minor) characters are used and then discarded without preamble, or at best a signing off sentence, their work in servicing the plot done.
Talking of plot, I finished the book feeling that it was imbalanced. There are elements of Peter and Sukie’s journeys that seem unnecessary – whether it be Peter’s sojourns to Europe as part of his apprenticeship or Sukie’s random relationship with a married woman. Whilst they give pleasant enough general background, they felt rather like filler.
In addition, there’s an abrupt about-turn in the latter part of the novel’s plot where what began as a search for knowledge becomes a rumination on personal history, This leads to an ending which can perhaps be best described as enigmatic – a damp squib of a conclusion that understandable but was clearly meant to mean more than it did to me.
This all sounds rather negative, but there is a lot to like here. This is because Sparks of Bright Matter is an ambitious book, if not totally successful. Whilst some of its details are engaging and exciting, the unevenness of the plot and the unlikability of some of its main characters tempered this one a little for me. Nevertheless, a novel from a debut author with potential, even if the book for me was not entirely triumphant.
SPARKS OF BRIGHT MATTER by Leeanne O’Donnell
Published by eriu, April 2024
ISBN: 978 1804 184 127
314 pages
Review by Mark Yon
