Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

From my brief research, it seems that historical novels are not necessarily Dexter Palmer's thing, or at least he hasn't committed himself to a genre as an author. This book feels to be like a bit of a failed foray into the genre, at least for this subject. 

Palmer takes the real case of Mary Toft from the England of 1776 and brings it to life here. The thing is, he does so in such a way to take all the fascination out of it. In case you are unfamiliar with the story (as I was), Mary Toft appeared to give birth to rabbits, bamboozling her doctors and earning her a trip to London where her fraud was uncovered. Now to my mind, if you are going to do a fictionalisation of this, you are going to play up all the weird, fantastical elements of it, maybe add in a bit of actual magic, who knows. Use it as inspiration more than focus on its actual fraudulent nature. And Palmer does dabble in speculative fiction! But alas, it was not to be. Instead, he focuses on the group of male physicians (affording Mary a brief chapter from her point of view which has some… questionable sections in it i.e. using the ol' 'women are empty vessels' metaphors etc etc) and how they felt about the whole thing. No weirdness, no nothing. To say I was disappointed is an understatement.

There are other issues here, too. It feels clumsy, the prose feels too American to be able to accurately depict the little English town of Godalming, it overexplains its ideas repeatedly, hammering them over the head until they're no longer interesting. There are moments of occasional brilliance in the description, but in general, I felt Palmer to be out of his depth with this story. I was keen to read his novel Version Control based on the wonderful reviews but now I'm not so sure… though they are supposedly quite different.