I liked, for example, the way Diana tries to sublimate her magic powers in running and rowing and doing yoga – at a mixed vampire-witch-daemonic yoga class, participants struggle not to levitate during their vinyasas. And yet, the ideas have just enough suction, somehow, to present an undemanding reader with some nice frissons. The historical background is a total pudding. Characters and relationships are stereotyped. Īs will be obvious by now, this is a very silly novel. Diana may have stumbled on the missing link between magic and Darwinian evolution in which case, her life is in deadly danger. The mysterious book, Matthew thinks, contains a powerful secret, something to do with witches and vampires and junk DNA. His jerseys are grey cashmere, his shoes alone 'cost more than the average academic's entire wardrobe'. His name is Matthew Clairmont, he's a biochemist and a neuroscientist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Fellow of All Souls. He's 'tall', with 'broad shoulders' and 'eyes as black as night'. The library is crawling with readers who look human but are in fact vampires the scrutiny of one in particular is bothersome. Could this be because Diana herself is a witch, albeit trying to live in denial of her heritage? (Which is why, she says, she studies alchemy: 'The search for a rational order in nature rather than a supernatural one mirrored my own efforts to stay away from what was hidden,' etc.)īut anyway, Diana is being watched. Ashmole 782, Diana realises, is a palimpsest, loaded with occult messages protected by magic spells she touches it, and the book 'lets out a small sigh'. She calls up a book from the collection of Elias Ashmole the illustrations are peculiar. The heroine of A Discovery of Witches ( DiscoWitch?) is an American called Diana Bishop, over in Oxford to research alchemical manuscripts in the Bodleian library. It's a neat concept, and easy to see why the publishers were hooked. Vampires would stick to science – the long hours in chilly labs would suit them. It probably is worth noting, however, that as a historian, Harkness specialises in the 17th century, the time when, as her novel puts it, 'astrology and witch-hunts yielded to Newton and universal laws' and that she decided, in answer to her own question, that nowadays vampires and witches would probably work, like her, as academics. The resulting opus is 600 pages long, the hit of the 2009 Frankfurt book fair, the first volume in a projected trilogy I don't think we need even mention Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer, or the entire walls of our suffering local libraries given over to 'urban fantasy' and 'dark romance'. Where would they go to meet each other? What sort of jobs would they do? In her day-job, Deborah Harkness is an academic historian of science her novel started, she says, the day she asked herself that question.

Imagine, for just one minute, that vampires, witches and so on really do exist.

A discovery of witches author