That Way Madness Lies: The Warlow Experiment

The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan

Serpent's Tail

Pp. 276

This novel is based on the true story of an eccentric Victorian gentleman, Herbert Powyss, who conducted an experiment; he placed an advert in a newspaper asking for a man to volunteer to be placed in isolation in his cellar for seven years with ‘every convenience desired’ but ‘without seeing a human face’. John Warlow was the only person who answered the advert, ‘a semi-literate labourer with a wife and six children to provide for’. Alix Nathan imagines how this experiment might have worked, or not, and she has created a rich novel of mental manipulation. She imagines that Powyss wants to see how a mind would cope without social contact and write up his findings to present to the Royal Society.

Powyss is typical of his era in that he likes to collect and catalogue things. He imagines that a human would be no different to his plants, “where so often he’d exerted order and precision, used good sense and experience, where reason had ruled”. Many of the metaphors are flora-related; he also hangs paintings on his walls of the Dutch masters and the cover of the book is a Flemish Vanitas image with fruit and flowers surrounded by insect life. Even the endpapers are glorious depictions of wildlife on wallpaper, representing both the care with which Powyss took to furnish Warlow’s underground apartments, and the never-ceasing ecological effects of co-existence.

Everyone in the house is affected by the presence of the man in the cellar, including the cook and the butler. The novel frequently switches perspective mid-chapter from Powyss to Fox, his old schoolfellow, or Hannah, Warlow’s wife, to Catherine, the housemaid. As one expects, madness ensues, and there are clear echoes of Frankenstein, Pygmalion, and even Jekyll and Hyde. Science without nature is abhorrent and potentially impossible. Life is fragile and unpredictable. Alix Nathan’s book is a superb rationale for the Ethical Conduct of Human Research Committee.