It’s an evocative and atmospheric work of historical fiction featuring strong Gothic undercurrents and a relentless bleakness; a dark book packed with shadows both literal and figurative. The pull of the narrative is steady and strong, inviting readers into a world that will haunt their imaginations long after the final page is turned ... Nathan has imagined a vivid and unsettling place, one where the wealthy can indulge their whims without accountability and the poverty-stricken are willing to sacrifice everything for the perceived comfort money can bring. It is a tale of the power of isolation, the necessity of physical and emotional contact to the well-being of the social animal that is man ... The Warlow Experiment is captivating, capturing the spine and spirit of a particular place and time. It is rife with an aesthetic and attitudinal murkiness that wholly engulfs, pulling us into the deepest parts of the many shadows cast.
Preventing things from seeming over-schematic, rich period detail and grippingly peopled subplots about the era’s radical insurgency and reactionary repression add engrossing depth to this compelling tale of a ruinously backfiring experiment.
Nathan... supplies the details to make her characters come alive, capturing the difficulties in human relationships (or lack thereof) and the tragic outcomes that can arise from unforeseen circumstances. All general readers will enjoy.
...a powerful, imaginative novel ... Nathan's novel has something of the fable about it, and its unadorned prose aids the narrative drive so essential to this form ... It is Nathan's scrupulous objectivity that enables the complexity of her characters to emerge ... For all the grim logic of its horrifying finale, what distinguishes The Warlow Experiment above all is how Nathan—unlike Powyss—treats her subject with unfailing dignity and compassion.
...intriguing yet overlong ... 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.
In a novel premised on stagnation, the incremental but inevitable deterioration of both major characters becomes an unexpectedly gripping drama, fueled by the attraction of repulsion ... the novel veers into pure gothic horror, and Nathan’s writing, having lost its subtle ironic edge, barely skirts histrionics. With its echoes of Frankenstein and Michael Myers, plus a quote from Psalm 130 and a meteor in the sky, the final scene piles it on. Surprisingly, though, such lapses fail to spoil this unique and chilling novel.
The sense that Nathan evokes so skilfully in her short fiction, that her stories are mere glimpses of a complex and fully realized world, is plainly a matter of fact ... Unfortunately...much of the new material...weigh[s] the novel down. While Nathan’s stories glitter, dangerous with hidden depth, the book plods, its plot fatally underpowered. It takes too long for the effects of Warlow’s incarceration to gain momentum and, when at last the household cracks under its pressure, the events feel forced and improbable. More frustratingly, though the extra pages provide more detailed encounters with the two protagonists, these do little to deepen our understanding of either man. There are some powerful moments, but...[i]t is in Nathan’s crisp and haunting stories that this strange sliver of history achieves its fullest consideration.
The Warlow Experiment is the dark side of the manor house, a microcosmic exploration of a system where one person, by accident of birth, controls the fate of many. Herbert Powyss is not evil, but entitlement does flow through his veins ... Through him, Nathan shows how even a seemingly benevolent master can ruin lives as easily as he breathes. That underneath Moreham House's tables of sweet tarts and orange jellies, its Apulian vases and espaliered pear trees, its books of classical ideals and natural philosophy, there is the life of a servant or laborer, that of a mother or child, inextricably run down and destroyed. The system of entitlement is too entrenched and even revolution, large or small, can't save them. What is lurking beneath Herbert Powyss' house? Exactly what we feared.
Social dominance, and the violent means used to maintain it, unites the various storylines in The Warlow Experiment. In the novel’s hectic conclusion Ms. Nathan stages a series of moral awakenings and comeuppances that overturn the expected order of things. These feel forced and not terribly convincing. But Warlow’s plight itself is indelible, both pungent and horrifying in its details and profound as a metaphor—a symbol of upper-class barbarity stashed away in the cellar like a telltale heart beating beneath the floorboards.
... whereas the short stories offered evocative glimpses of these two lives, in this ambitious novel the larger story loses its focus and is bogged down in historical detail ... Powyss’ world is richly and memorably drawn ... Unfortunately much of the Enlightenment thinking is clumsily conveyed either in the form of one character’s tutelage of another, or by means of missives from Powyss’ Unitarian friend, a character whose only role is to depict the wider political and social context ... Powyss’ inappropriate interactions with Warlow’s wife soon muddy his experiment, just as the inclusion of her and other less interesting secondary characters muddies the novel. The overarching contrast between worlds of darkness and light is a promising one, and at her best Nathan is a perceptive, elegant writer, but ultimately this is a novel that doesn’t quite come together.
As an allegory of prison culture at its cruelest, Nathan’s novel forces its conclusion, and one friend exists mainly to send Herbert finger-wagging letters, but overall the novel is a powerful rebuke to the notion that withholding compassion can somehow be corrective. Nathan’s main strength is her keen characterizations of all involved, fully inhabiting Herbert’s selfishness and John’s confusion and slow, crushing descent. A sturdy historical novel about the perils of pseudoscience, revealing how selfishly oblivious we can be to facts and emotion alike.
Inventive and engrossing, this novel casts a glaring light on the so-called Age of Enlightenment and the realities that come crashing down on Powyss’ high-minded pursuit of knowledge.
