The Taxidermist’s Daughter is set in the momentous year of 1912, yet this fact seems far from important. Kate Mosse omits mention of the year’s defining events – the sinking of the Titanic, the suffragette movement, industrialisation – and focuses, instead, on the events of a small, insular, marshland town, Fishbourne, in Sussex, and its occupants. Drawing on traditional ghost stories and gothic literature, the microcosmic nature of the setting – cut off from the developments of the rest of the country – conjures a world in which realism is of little concern; rather, here, spectacle and suspense take priority.
The novel opens with a murder in a graveyard at midnight; crows and magpies crowd its landscape; and Mosse’s prose, which begins with a dramatic one-word sentence, “Midnight”, and is interrupted, throughout, by a repeated phrase “Blood. Skin. Bone” and assertions in italics such as “This is no place for the living”, is suitably theatrical.
An interconnected dual mystery is at the core of the novel, whose heroine, Constantia Gifford, practises her father’s trade, for with the failure of his once-thriving business, Gifford’s World Famous House of Avian Curiosities, the taxidermist has sunk into drunken inertia. Connie is bright, beautiful and determined. She is a victim of traumatic memory loss and the plot involves her mind’s retrieval of obscene happenings 10 years previously. The closer we come to understanding the events and characters of the present, the more of her dark past is revealed, and vice versa. Clues carefully placed throughout neatly come together in a climax that has all the ingredients of a typical gothic thriller – a storm and a flood, a fallen woman and the reveal of a gruesome crime.
Mosse weaves some difficult themes into the narrative, such as the effects of sexual violence, murder and grief, and her descriptions of the marshlands of Fishbourne – where she herself grew up – are outstanding. Her writing in these passages comes alive and, in turn, breathes life into the setting. The dangers of the marshland – the wind has “teeth”, and the water “pulses” – cleverly echo and magnify the suspenseful and precarious nature of its inhabitants’ lives.
The Taxidermist’s Daughter is published by Orion (£7.99. Click here to buy it for £5.99
