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Edgar Jones is born to a mother expecting a girl, while a strange comet shower rains down on Victorian Oxford. He emerges from the womb with hair down the length of his spine and a growing curiosity about everything around him. His mother finds him hard to love, while William, his father has great aspirations for him that are frustrated when Edgar won’t take to his lessons. By the time Edgar turns seven, he is acutely aware that he is a great disappointment, so he determines to make his own way in the world and make his father proud by inventing and engineering. Everything Edgar does widens the gap between father and son. Edgar’s desperate aspirations get him into real trouble.‘The Ingenious Edgar Jones’ is a novel where the ideas the author wants to express are intriguing and complex. Edgar and William’s father/son relationship illustrates how a parent can estrange themselves from a very young child through unjustified disappointment. William believes in standardised education and books above all else, but Edgar seems to suffer from serious dyslexia and is better at creating mechanical things. Despite his admiration of learning William sees the devil in scientific inventions he feels seek to pry into God’s mysteries, while Edgar is a born scientific pioneer. The novel explores popular arguments about the conflict between science and religion and also looks at how religion and science might be joined together in harmony, through their relationship. The novel also contains a strong theme about how reputation and appearances of respectability can lure people into abandoning their sense of right and wrong.
Unfortunately the protagonist of this book is one creepy little kid and the disturbing shudder he sent through me with his uncaring, all knowing smiles kept me unsettled throughout the book. Although Edgar’s situation is easy to relate to and his frustrations with his father are very palpable, he’s not a character I ever felt at ease with. Unreasonably I kind of wanted him to be caught and staked, even though he is just a little boy and I felt none of the sympathy I usually do for misunderstood characters tied to supernatural happenings. I was convinced he was going to turn out to be a changeling, left in place of the girl his mother thought she was going to give birth to and although that never happened I still think of him as a changeling, swapped by the sinister neighbour present at his birth. Well done to Gardner for creating such an effective, unsettling character, but in my case Edgar made me eager to be done with the book and I rather rushed through to the end to escape him.
