This is an historical novel set in the 1820s, but the resurrectionists of the title were not evangelical preachers. Rather, they were grave robbers, murderers and suppliers of corpses (some suspiciously fresh) to the respectable anatomists of late-Georgian London. They preyed on those who had sought fortune in the metropolis, fallen by the wayside in the pursuit of riches and descended to death via a path of crime, prostitution, disease or drugs. The resurrectionists were the dark side of the advances in medicine that depended on a more regular supply of bodies than the gallows could provide (between the reign of Henry VIII and the Anatomy Act of 1832, executed criminals were the only legal source of corpses for dissection).

This is the world Gabriel Swift enters as an apprentice to a respectable London anatomist with a need for bodies to demonstrate anatomy to paying students. As with many others in the novel – de Mandeville, Lucan, Gunn, Graves – Gabriel’s surname is vaguely allusive to dark literary-historical figures or grim things, while his Christian name suggests an angelic nature that events belie. The Resurrectionist is not, however, a comic novel in the tradition of other London writers such as Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens, and little seems to be made of nomenclature beyond some suggestive shadowing. Instead, the novel proceeds as a first-person narrative, gothic in content and realist in mode. Even though the main skill in a gothic thriller lies in leaving things to the imagination, the quantity of explanation is at a perilously low level, risking reader dislocation, especially in the opening sections. This technique comes into its own later in the novel, as we come to know the way Gabriel’s mind works and to interpret the gap between the spare (even numb) narration and the chaotic circumstances described properly as a depiction of a mind and soul in free fall.

A succession of accidents, debts, a feud and a developing addiction to alcohol and opium lead to Gabriel abandoning surgical training, and destitution leaves him with little option but to enlist with the sinister Lucan as a grave robber. The spiral downwards continues and, near the bottom, he reacts to a particularly nasty event thus: ‘I should care, I know, but I do not. With each of them something dulls inside of me. Even as it holds me here I feel a hopelessness, a sense that this is wrong but that I have failed somehow. Of something once within my grasp and already fled.’

Sensibly, Bradley does not attempt to put a mock-Georgian façade on his prose; neither does he make the language racily postmodern. There is, in fact, very little historical consciousness in the novel at all. For example, while a friend of Gabriel’s dissolute father is described as ‘a Methodist, as many were already in those parts’, none of the characters seems psychologically shaped by Christian attitudes to death and the body, as at least some in the 1820s faced with such experiences would surely have been. Even the sardonic description of grave robbers as resurrectionists leads nowhere obvious unless we are supposed to read the middle section of the novel allegorically as a harrowing of hell.

The ‘hopelessness’ Gabriel feels is more a modernist anomie than a nineteenth-century grappling with sin and depravity, which is fine, but it does mean that The Resurrectionist is only accidentally set in the past. Gabriel, in particular, does not think or speak as one shaped by a particularly nineteenth-century education or experience. He has a detached assurance as an observer of his world that is more like Albert Camus than any protagonist in Walter Scott or his contemporaries.

The publisher’s blurb encourages readers to find Gabriel’s claustrophobic spareness ‘stark, sinister and compelling’, and many will, no doubt, agree with this assessment. Others might feel that they are being asked to make a lot of interpretative effort when the content of the text is essentially that of a thriller. To me, the novel could afford a bit more elaboration. It focuses so acutely on a character who deliberately avoids introspection that it resists the intellectual range of literary fiction without providing the easy narrative gratification of a thoroughly realised fictional world.

What we get instead is an intensely physical presentation of the descent into addiction and criminality. This is capably done, and the coda in New South Wales (it is not for a reviewer to explain how this happens) sets a subtle balance between woundedness and the possibility of redemption. That fragile and demanding container of individuality, the body, is the book’s central mystery: its appetites and frailties; its capacity to overpower the conscious will; its beauty and ugliness; its different representations by artists, writers and anatomists.

In the end, The Resurrectionist evades easy categories such as historical romance, thriller or gothic horror. The least unsatisfactory summary this reviewer can devise for Bradley’s unsettling novel is to describe it as a kind of late Georgian grunge fiction with an ambiguous colonial coda.