Based on Wilson's own ancestor, the craftsman potter/industrialist/visionary Josiah Wedgwood does not spring to life off the page, despite being hung about with enough 18th century tropes to audition for Blackadder.
The other principal, the male romantic interest, travels to the American colonies as they prepare to rebel against George III, to buy fine china clay from the surprisingly urbanised and technologised Cherokee nation - who, in this narrative, are more civilised than the degenerate colonists, some of whom have reverted to absolute barbarism.
Actually, that was the bit I liked. After that it got a bit dull. The Big Man grows old and cantankerous, his spoilt sons fall short ... but it was ever thus with dynasties.
It does not convince, either, when these sons fall in with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who clearly figures in Wilson's mind as a fraud and a blot on our history.
This Coleridge is a slug and a bludger, the poet belittled to score cheap thrills of denigration, Oh, all right, Wilson is allowed to dislike Coleridge, he doesn't crack me up either, but it doesn't do much for the novel, and if it is intended to amuse, well, it didn't.
Then there is the clumsy striving for drug cred. Most of the cast (who include Darwin's dad, among other historical celebrities) are on varying doses of laudanum through 500 pages, but they are usually in pain so that's at least relevant. But there is a particularly gratuitous attempt at a Cheech and Chong moment which is laughable, but for the wrong reasons.
And I seriously doubt the phrase "muscle up" was used in 1760. But if it was, it would still disturb the surface tension of a text that strives to feel robustly Georgian, and doesn't.
Rick Bryant is an Auckland reviewer.
