The Warlow Experiment

June 3, 2019
Nathan’s intriguing yet overlong U.S. debut tracks what happens after an experiment in late-18th-cenutry Wales goes awry. In 1793, the wealthy Herbert Powyss, seeking to “contribute something important to the sphere he so admired: natural philosophy, science,” devises an experiment—to have a man live in total isolation for seven years in chambers deep under Powyss’s Welsh estate. The incentive is £50 per year for life, and only one man applies: the semiliterate, working-class John Warlow. Warlow is given ample comforts—the same food that Powyss eats (delivered via dumbwaiter) and any book he desires. But Warlow has little interest in reading and can barely write in the journal he’s supposed to keep; he’s more interested in the frogs he finds in his chambers. Complications further ensue when Powyss develops an affection for Hannah, Warlow’s wife. Naturally, the experiment doesn’t go as planned, but the novel never picks up a full head of steam, instead remaining largely static narratively and devoting ample page space to the servants on the estate. There are provocative wrinkles—such as whether it’s an inevitability that Powyss was going to hate the man he is experimenting on—but the story takes too long to get where it’s going and doesn’t fully land once it does. Nathan’s novel never fully lives up to its promising premise.

Alix Nathan uses many points of view to tell this story, and narrator Mark Meadows does a fine job differentiating them with various voices and accents. The audiobook is set in the late eighteenth century, and its language and story place more emphasis on class distinctions and class enmities than is usually the case in a contemporary novel. Meadows is especially good when Warlow, the subject of a supposed Enlightenment experiment, is left alone in an underground room. The experiment is intended to isolate him from human contact for seven years. Of course, it ends badly for almost everyone involved. Meadows maintains his compassion for all the characters, no matter how mad or lacking in compassion they may be. D.M.H. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine