Recently my wife and I went out for date night and attended a free performance by the UGA Symphony Orchestra, then went for some tasty burgers at Clocked, saw a great band at Flicker, and ended up having a nightcap at the Go Bar as Dr. Fred, king of karaoke jockeys, presided over some mighty fine amateur house-rocking. It was, all in all, a deeply satisfying evening, one of many that we’ve spent moving between the worlds of the University and downtown. In the last year we’ve gone to see Noh performers, watched our fine local burlesque troupe, pub-crawled with zombies, attended lectures and openings and juried exhibitions, seen some great community theater, eaten very well and discovered musicians and musicians and musicians…

I say it often in this column (and yet not often enough), and the beginning of the UGA school year is a perfect time to reiterate: Athens is a wonderful place to live whether you’re here for school or here for life. Unlike a lot of other college towns, which seem to be mere parking lots for their institutions of higher learning, over the years our town has struck a vital balance between the offerings of the university and the vibrant life of town itself. On any given day or night there’s a dozen or so things to do, all of which beat mall-trolling or binge-drinking at the house. All you need do is seek them out (the hippie socialist rag you’re holding now is a good place to look).

While there are many townies who won’t venture through the Arch and many students who refuse to travel west of Hull Street, the opportunities are always there. This was not the case not too terribly long ago. There was a time when a university was a gated enclave, an exclusive preserve of the sons of the upper classes as they prepared to take their places as lords and masters over the rabble circulating about the other side of the walls. Town existed to provide for "gown," but the two worlds were off-limits to one another. Such is the portrait Elizabeth Garner presents of Oxford University, the setting of her remarkable novel The Ingenious Edgar Jones (Random House, 2009).

William Jones considers himself blessed in his rise from orphaned kitchen-brat to his current job as an Oxford porter (a glorified night watchman), in his marriage to former tavern-wench Eleanor, and in the impending birth of their child. The child is born one night in 1847, his arrival coinciding with a meteor shower, as if the skies themselves are announcing his presence. But the boy is strange from the moment he draws breath, a leathery baby with a ridge of stiff hair down his spine. Young Edgar is wild and inquisitive, looking to escape even before he can walk, and getting into everything. His feral disposition is matched by his unwillingness to speak and, after he finally does, in his inability to learn to read. Eleanor despairs of her child and soon so does the more amiable William. It seems that nothing can be done for the boy, even after William gains an audience with a professor of physiology, who proclaims the boy’s affliction to be “bad blood.”

But Edgar is much more clever than anyone around him realizes. His explorations and insatiable curiosity have given him an acute insight into how things work and are put together, and at seven he apprentices himself to the local blacksmith, where he learns how the pieces of iron that hold the world together are forged. When a controversial professor of anatomy asks the smith for help in building a contraption for his experiments, it’s Edgar who figures out how to do it, and soon the boy is working for the professor on the most ambitious project the university has seen in an age, the building of a natural history museum, a monument to the emergence of the sciences from beneath the cloud of religion.

The museum will be the battleground between Oxford’s old guard and a new breed of scholars determined to break God’s mysteries wide open, but for Edgar all that matters is the building, the blossoming of the architecture, and the song of the iron. His father, however, is not so sanguine—not only does this new edifice fly in the face of everything he has always believed about man’s relationship with God’s creation, but when Edgar is callously dismissed by his patron, William finds a growing rage within himself against the university and its so-called better class of men. Edgar has his own grudges going, and when he is apprenticed to Oxford Town’s resident inventor, he acquires the skills to enact a terrible vengeance on the men who tossed him aside. All of these forces come together on one ill-fated night with cataclysmic results and disastrous consequences.

Garner has put together a great novel here, Dickensian in atmosphere and sentiment, but with an ability to make the period seem immediate that one finds in the work of Susanna Clarke and Neil Gaiman. While it’s by no means a steampunk novel, fans of that genre will find the iron and smoke, clockwork and gadgetry of the age quite comfortable. Garner imbues her characters with life and subtlety, and not the least of these characters is Oxford itself. The book is a love song to the university, with its spires and gargoyles and old stone steeped in history, which she renders in deep, affectionate detail.

The ending of the book may surprise some readers—one critic called it “a late lunge into magical realism”—but I find the ending completely in keeping with the rest of the novel, with its constant supply of wonders in a time when wonders were about to become commonplace, when reason was on the brink of becoming the dominant force in academia and the world beyond, and when the divide between the cloisters of learning and the rest of unwashed humanity first began to crumble. It was an exciting time, and The Ingenious Edgar Jones is a story worthy of it.

John G. Nettles