Douglas Palmer, contributor
Mary Anning is a historical figure whose life story tends to attract biographers with backgrounds far removed from the niceties of early 19th century English natural science, culture and society - not to mention life in the small coastal port of Lyme Regis in rural Dorset.
Mary was one of Dorset's rural poor but she had an extraordinary talent for fossil hunting. She was just 12 years old when she discovered the first complete fossil of an ichthyosaur, a giant dolphin-like reptile that lived more than 200 million years ago.
She collected and sold fossils for a living, never married and died of breast cancer at the age of 47. Little is known about her, except indirectly through the people who bought her fossils.
Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, is known for her ability to spin a good tale. Inspired by a visit to a Dorchester dinosaur exhibit, Chevalier felt compelled to take on Mary's story. The result is Remarkable Creatures, a novel that portrays Mary's transcendence of class and gender through her dealings with the largely male and middle-class dominated world of early 19th century science.
Mary struck up an unusual friendship with Elisabeth Philpot, a local middle class spinster who also collected fossils. Chevalier uses Philpot's character as a foil to the male dominance against which Mary struggled, and the story is cleverly told in the voices of these two women in alternating chapters.
Mary's story is, in many ways, an unusual and richly interesting one - but not especially dramatic. To fully appreciate it, one needs a lot of background about scientific and cultural developments in the early 19th century. Readers also need to know who the numerous other main characters were and why they were significant. All of that back story requires careful and subtle working into the book.
Chevalier is pretty adept at this, but at times the dialogue is obviously being used to provide back story--a transparent literary device that breaks the novel's spell. For example, Mary asks the Reverend Doctor William Buckland of the University of Oxford, "Why would God make creatures that don't exist any more?" It is an obvious attempt to explain how fossils were viewed at the time and why some of Mary's fossils of extinct forms of life, such as the ichthyosaur, were so significant and controversial.
Language can also be tricky for any historical novel. Mary would have had a strong native Dorset accent and dialect, which was so distinctive that it became part of the attraction for the gentility and middle classes who were beginning to take seaside holidays at Lyme in the early 19th century. The Dorset dialect could be conveyed as Thomas Hardy did in his novels but today it would seem somewhat risible, like Pythonesque funny voices.
Chevalier sensibly steers away from that and tries to employ a middle way between modern and realistic speech. In general it works, but would a genteel middle class spinster of the time mutter, "God damn you, you bloody idiot"?
Chevalier freely admits to taking creative liberties in her fictional account - liberties like the inevitable intimations of thwarted romance. Still the book is an excellent read and is no doubt being carefully pored over to see whether it can be adapted for the big screen, where no doubt further liberties will have to be taken.
Historians of science have been slowly piecing together the details of Mary's life from obscure and scattered sources. The true story is much more of a rambling Dickensian multi-character, eccentric story than the one Chevalier portrays. It seems that Mary Anning and Elisabeth Philpot are still awaiting a chevalier to rescue them not from obscurity, but from fiction.
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
Dutton $26.95 / HarperCollins £15.99