A few years ago, browsing the 1797 edition of the Annual Register, a reference work established in the 1750s to provide a “view of the History, Politicks and Literature of the Year”, Alix Nathan came across a curious entry. In a single short paragraph, it described what appeared to be some kind of scientific experiment, conducted by a Mr Powyss of Moreham in Lancashire. Some years earlier Mr Powyss had published an advertisement offering a reward of £50 a year for life to any man willing to live for seven years underground without seeing another human face. While the successful applicant would be required to “let his toe and fingernails grow during the whole of his confinement, together with his beard”, his conditions would be comfortable, even luxurious: his “commodious apartments” would include meals served from Mr Powyss’s own table, a bathtub with cold running water, a chamber-organ, and “as many books as the occupier should desire”. According to the Register, a labouring man with a large family had accepted the post. He was, by 1797, in the “fourth year of his probation”.
Intrigued, Nathan tried to discover more about Powyss and the outcome of his experiment, but without success. Nothing of either remained. Instead she turned to fiction, writing a pair of short stories that imagined the peculiar undertaking, the first from Powyss’s point of view, “An Experiment: Above”, and then, in “An Experiment: Below”, from the solitary subterranean perspective of his confined subject. Both were included in her excellent 2014 collection, His Last Fire, which attracted acclaim from, among others, Hilary Mantel, who praised Nathan as “an original, with a virtuoso touch”.
The enthusiasm was well earned. “An Experiment: Above” is a subtle and unsettling story of a reclusive gentleman scientist in the late Enlightenment mould whose ambitious experiment into the effects of unrelieved solitude on the human spirit has begun to trouble him. Though Powyss reassures himself that the man confined in his cellars is there of his own free will and, with his family amply provided for, enjoys an existence infinitely more easeful than before, he listens uneasily to the howls that echo up through the hearing tube he has secretly installed in the underground apartments. Meanwhile Powyss’s growing affection for the man’s wife and youngest daughter delights and discomfits him in equal measure. In a few short pages, the story conjures a man torn vividly between compassion and ambition, doubt and authority, conscience and desire.
“An Experiment: Below” is similarly nuanced, driven as much by the absences in the story as the story itself. Nathan’s confined man, John Warlow, is a rough creature, brutish and coarse, but she makes something touching from his deep ache for the land and the seasons that mark it, his meticulously summoned fantasies of back-breaking labour, the overwhelming, maddening powerlessness of his situation. For all the callous inhumanity of Powyss’s experiment, in Nathan’s imagination its strictures guide both men to find within themselves a new and unexpected tenderness.
Despite this, Powyss and his story continued to nag at Nathan; she could not shake the sense that it “deserved fuller consideration”. The result is The Warlow Experiment. In incubating her twin stories to a full-length novel she has changed remarkably little of her original detail: a number of scenes survive almost unaltered. The sense that Nathan evokes so skilfully in her short fiction, that her stories are mere glimpses of a complex and fully realised world, is plainly a matter of fact.
The larger canvas of a novel allows her to create a household for Powyss, to give voices and subplots to the servants required to serve his experiment, and to root the undertaking more firmly in its politically febrile times. In 1793, with Louis XVI recently guillotined and blood running through the streets of Paris, ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity were inflaming dissent on both sides of the Channel. The notion that a well-born man might deny a poor man his freedom, simply by dint of his rank and wealth, was no longer a matter for private conscience. While Powyss is little interested in politics, letters from his friend Benjamin Fox, a radical in London, punctuate the book.
Unfortunately these, like too much of the new material, weigh 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 readers intrigued by the lost story of Powyss and his experiment would do better to seek out His Last Fire. It is in Nathan’s crisp and haunting stories that this strange sliver of history achieves its fullest consideration.
• In the Full Light of the Sun by Clare Clark is published by Virago. The Warlow Experiment is published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
