Murcheston: the Wolf's Tale [Hardcover]

On the first full moon since he returned to England, Edgar turns into a werewolf, frolicking on his estate with a sense of freedom he never felt before. He cherishes his so-called affliction, embracing lycanthropy to the point that his human soul begins to shrivel. Unable to deal any longer with the human cattle, Edgar withdraws from society. His isolation ends when he wanders into London only to receive protection from his best friend Charles Meredith and the man's wife Elizabeth, the only woman Edgar ever loved. However, his transformation horrifies them, but not as much as Edgar's plans for the city.

MURCHESTON: THE WOLF'S TALE is a gothic-like novel complete with foggy nights, an isolated manor, and a damsel in danger and distress. The story line is written in the Victorian style, which adds to the overall impact of the tale. Tom Holland writes a werewolf tale that will set the standard for future such books to be measured against as he makes werewolves seem genuine and Edgar's joyful dissent into hell feel very real. This novel will be for years to come the definite fictional work on lycanthropy.

Murcheston is a compelling philosophical debate between ideas of individual strength and social obligation. Our aristocrat-turned-lycanthrope was always something of iconoclast, but with the transition to his new state he becomes an articulate advocate of man-as-animal, of might-makes-right, of survival-of-the-strongest.

Much of the book is told in the form of Lord Darnley's journal; and so we have his voice deriding the threadbare traditions of religion and also the hollow values and norms of society. Quite deftly, however, Holland makes the arguments of Darnley's opponents come alive through Darnley's own voice, and provides a very absorbing and persuasive debate.

Holland took the study in a psychological direction, imagining the impact on the individual of the philosophy lived to the fullest, under the influence of this great power and uncontrollable disease of lycanthropy. As such, Lord Darnley convincingly became less human in the course of his own journals, and throughout the larger work.

The psychological study was interesting, but to my mind less interesting than a fuller exploration of the philosophical distinction might have been.

Perhaps appropriate for the time(*) Darnley's arguments for the rule of strength, and the natural, animal nature of the human state were primarily explorations of Darwin's idea of natural selection in combination with a Nazi/Nietsche übermensch mentality, and while I was happy to see the counterarguments presented in a surprising and original manner, I was a little disappointed to see Darnley's case undercut by his own madness. There is a real debate here, and it does little good to present something widely thought of as evil and then expose the obvious flaws.

A more interesting approach might be to take the more contemporary if-it-feels-right-it-is-right rejection of traditional morality, equate feeling right with animal instinct, and then contrast this very contemporary mentality that is *not* thought of as evil with some of the same arguments for the higher nature of being human that Holland has made. This would be a more meaningful debate for our age, and one that does not have a clear outcome.

In short, Holland tells a good story. His characters are fascinating studies in psychology; there is a pleasantly surprising philosophical debate carried on within the text; and it is a worthwhile book to pick up on a dark and stormy night. Holland is onto something when he correlates the lycanthrope with the debate between the spiritual and animal sides of humanity, but in this book he does not explore that debate in a manner terribly relevant to our time. Given his affinity for Victoriana, that was probably not his intention.

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* He doesn't state it, but given that Victoria was queen, transportation to Australia was common, railroads were also common, this would pretty much have to be the late 1830s or early 1840s, a decade or two before Darwin's Origin of the Species.