This is a genuinely charming and engaging example of historical fiction, given added vim by a number of wittily handled po-mo touches. Mostly it is simply an entertaining read, although intermittently it becomes more than that and achieves palpable greatness. What it isn't is a Fantasy or time-travel SF yarn, but that's hardly a hanging offence.
The two main characters are actual people, and the core of what happens has historical sanction (Eyre is fond of quoting chunks of the Dictionary of National Biography to shore up the on-going narrative). Here is Sir Kenelm Digby, seventeenth-century aristocrat, natural philosopher, Catholic, alchemist and all-round old-fashioned English eccentric. More compellingly here is his wife, Venetia Anastasia Digby (née Stanley), one of the most acclaimed beauties of her generation. Which, if you're a fan of tiny mouths, wide-set-eyes, and a ghostly forehead fringe of hair that spells out 'dSygg666' like a captcha, she may well have been:
On a larger scale is the celebrated Van Dyck portrait of Venetia, which is used as the cover art for Eyre's novel:
Sir Kenelm's multifarious interests, and his wife's anxiety at her fading charms, are rendered by Eyre very skilfully: it's energetic, fluent and readable stuff. But it's all interleaved by the present, in ways that speak to a—strange to say—rather quaintly old-fashioned postmodern vibe ('vibus postmodernicus'). Early in the book Digby is interviewed by various gentlemen, amongst them Paxman, 'a soft Irish man called Wogan' and 'Jonathan Ross, a fool with weak "R"s' [34]. The author herself pops up ('a woman with a notebook marked "Viper Wine"', [37]). Kenelm notes ideas down under headings that include 'Cosmographie', 'Thaumaturgike' and 'Nanobiotechnology' (though when he looks again 'he could not remember what was meant' by this latter [249]). He gets weird garbled html messages from somewhere, 'response.setContentType("text/html")' and the like ('the letters seemed to [Kenelm] like a spell or symbolism more than a story: hieroglyphs' [179]), and instructs that the message 'One Small Step For Man One Giant Leap For Mankind' be painted along the wall of his long library: though the calligrapher slopes off leaving only 'One Small Step For Ma' [165]. All this is perfectly beguilingly done, threading the tricky path between hard core literary experimentation on the one hand and frou-frou whimsy on the other, only occasionally straying into either. It's scrupulously researched, too: I read with a pedant's eye for errors and found almost none (there's a 'by the by' on p.113 that should be 'by the bye'; and some Latin on p.222 that's not quite right). There is a class problem, not unusual in novels like this: we gad about with people of the caste of the Digbys and Van Dycks and other assorted posh nobs, whilst the 99% are background colour (one exception is an interleaved first-person narration by a poor Wessex lass; but it hardly counterbalances the posho bulk of this novel's 17th-Century).
It's in the nature of this kind of project, perhaps, that it's liable to go on too long, and to register a proportion (I'd gauge this, using my complicated actuarial equipment, at 22%) of misses for all the hits. More debilitating, perhaps, is the way the almost-whimsy degrades the novel's scenes of pathos: the way Eyre draws out Venetia's vanity into something more existentially eloquent; and Venetia's abrupt, early death, in which the titular 'viper wine' (another actual thing from history, a potion made from snakes supposed to keep a woman young looking) is implicated; and the profound grief of her husband. All this is good, and Eyre does interesting thematic things with Digby's interest in 'curing wounds at a distance' (he thought the trick was not to treat the wound, but to apply magic powders to the thing that caused the wound, no matter how far away it was from the wound it had caused). Overall, a notable novel. I enjoyed it very much.
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