The Great Unknown

December 15, 2019
Set in 1840s Scotland among homegrown intellectuals and science enthusiasts, this novel follows a young mother as she attempts to uncover the unsettling mysteries of her parentage. When Constantia Stevenson agrees to become a wet nurse for the precocious Chambers family, she does so under an unspoken condition: that no one may press her about her pseudonym. She's known to the Chambers family as Mrs. MacAdam, "a name assumed out of discretion, for her husband's sake," as the savvy Chambers matriarch explains. Good-natured curiosity bubbles around Constantia, and she nurses her own infant, Livia, and the Chambers' son, Charlie, against a familial backdrop of scientific discovery, heated debate, and progressive politics. The household and its guests are soon enthralled by the publication of the controversial new book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a proto-On the Origin of Species. Vestiges suggests, rather shockingly, "that everything...had come into existence through the uninterrupted operation of natural law." Stout creationists spar with the scientifically inclined at the dinner table, and even the gardener ponders natural selection as he regards his peach trees and rose bushes. As Constantia is drawn further into motherhood and family life with the Chambers, she is also overtaken with memories of her own childhood in India, where she was raised by a daring and reckless single mother. Kingman (Original Sins, 2010, etc.) deftly weaves Constantia's uncertain past with the political and scientific mores of her present, allowing questions of origin and design, motherhood and family, home and empire, to inform and play off one another. While it takes some time for the plot to reveal itself, the novel at last gives in to the conventions of chance and coincidence that make fiction work--albeit not without character commentary on the nature of "remarkable coincidences...and accidental discoveries!" This richly observed novel of ideas will delight fans of A.S. Byatt's Possession and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower alike. An intelligent, deeply felt family saga.

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Starred review from February 3, 2020
The anonymous 1844 publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a controversial text that anticipated the work of Darwin, serves as the linchpin for this beautifully wrought, panoramic historical from Kingman (Not Yet Drown’d). Events center on the Edinburgh household of the Chambers family and their wet nurse, Constantia MacAdam, all of whom become familiar with how the text challenges their Victorian culture’s prevailing religious and political beliefs. Through meticulously detailed descriptions of the Chambers family and their friends, Kingman shows how the work’s scientific speculations are reflected in innumerable facets of their day-to-day lives: the births and deaths of children, the distinguishing physiological peculiarities of several family members, the horticultural wisdom of the household’s gardener, the fossil hunting obsession of Constantia’s husband, Hugh, and even the couple’s Chartist working-class sympathies. While the plot never veers from the quiet of the English and French countryside, Kingman ably pulls together the many threads to paint the portrait of a time when humanity perched on the precipice of great change. Kingman’s evocation of a specific time and place, and her depiction of the role that chance, rather than deliberate design, plays both in the natural world and in her characters makes for gratifying storytelling. Kingman masterfully combines history with propulsive drama.