Rose (Hardcover)

But the plot recedes behind its protagonist, Jonathan Blair. Blair himself has little interest in his mission - the search for a missing curate - forced upon him by his patron, Bishop Hannay, worldly churchman, aristocrat and owner of the Wigan coal mines.

Blair's drive is his desire to return to Africa and his Anglo-African daughter. A mining engineer hired to map gold country in Africa, Blair was yanked in disgrace after he appropriated church funds to pay his workers. Expedition leaders were expected to make up a shortfall of funds from their own pockets but Blair, no gentleman, possesses no private income.

An American by upbringing, Blair was born in Wigan. His father was unknown and his mother was buried at sea on the journey to America, leaving him in the care of an American mining engineer named Blair. A small child at the time, Blair recalls no other name.

Bishop Hannay has promised him Africa in return for finding John Maypole, the zealous curate who was engaged to Hannay's ascerbic daughter Charlotte. Not until he arrives in Wigan does Blair discover that Maypole disappeared on the same day 76 men were killed in a mine explosion of mysterious origin.

Blair's hatred of things British, particularly the aristocracy and the grueling fates of laborers, brings an aura of dread and reluctance to all his encounters and descriptions.

His soul imbues his observations with beauty, as when he arranges to go into the mine: "In dark fields on either side Blair could make out miners in the dark by the glow of their pipes and the mist of their breath. The fields smelled of manure, the air of ash. Ahead, from a high chimney, issued a silvery column of smoke that at its very peak was colored by dawn."

Miners descend before daylight, ascend after sunset, spending their day a mile below the surface. Seen through Blair's observant eyes the mine is riveting, claustrophobic and tense. There are so many ways to die down there.

Blair pursues his investigation among the pit girls (the scandal of Britain in their pants and freedom) becoming fascinated by one, Rose, whose effect on the curate may have lead to his death.

His dogged if unwilling persistence crosses nearly everyone in a town rife with secrets, and brutal in defending them. Blair insinuates himself into miners' lives, the do-gooder activities of Charlotte and her naive curate, the maneuvering of mine owners. He explores abandoned tunnels, and pokes around in the rubble of the explosion. A fight with Rose's beau, a man who excels in a form of kick-boxing in clogs fitted with brass studs, nearly ends in his death.

All of these activities lead him closer to the curate's fate but more important, they pull the reader into a world completely alien, involve us in its sensations and smells, longings and loves, dirt and danger.

This is a book to read slowly, for the tactile beauty of its prose and the power of the world it evokes.