‘We That Are Left,’ by Clare Clark

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There’s an exchange halfway through Clare Clark’s fine new novel that gets to the heart of the book’s concerns. The speakers are Oscar Greenwood, studying physics at Cambridge just when Einstein’s theory of relativity is gaining widespread attention, and Phyllis Melville, a World War I nurse who, post-armistice, is intent on becoming an archaeologist. “Just because we can’t picture something,” Oscar tells her, “doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” “I thought scientists weren’t allowed to say things like that,” she observes. His reply? “These days they are.”

The trick, Clark suggests in “We That Are Left,” is to distinguish genuine knowledge from calculated hokum. But that’s no easy task at a time when millions of people are desperate to communicate with their recent battle­field dead — and even a key inventor of wireless radio technology believes in the possibility of spiritualist contact with “the Other Side.”

Here, as in her earlier books, Clark delivers a lavishly detailed historical novel that doesn’t just recreate the past but alters your perception of it. Her 2005 debut, “The Great Stink,” viewed 1850s London through the eyes of a troubled engineer hired to stop untreated sewage from flowing into the Thames. “Beautiful Lies” focused on 1880s London, when the British capital, in the throes of rising unemployment, seemed on the verge of revolution. (We’re talking encampments of homeless people in Trafalgar Square — with the riot police standing ready to clobber them.) Now comes a novel that takes England’s brutal casualties in the Great War as its starting point.

This isn’t, admittedly, untilled ground. British writers who experienced the war, either on the home front (Virginia Woolf) or in the trenches (Ford Madox Ford, Frederic Manning), were seared into writing masterpieces about it. For later authors — notably Pat Barker and William Boyd — World War I and its aftershocks have inspired gripping work.

Clark puts her own stamp on this subject matter by taking the losses of the war as a given and concentrating on the survivors. The setting is Ellinghurst, a faux-medieval manor on the southern edge of the New Forest that’s home to the Melville family. The Melvilles have lost two men to the trenches: Theo, the mischievous, restless son of Sir Aubrey and his wife, Eleanor; and Henry, Sir Aubrey’s much younger brother, a physicist who has already made a mark in his field.

The novel plays out like a study of every possible response to bereavement. In her grief, Eleanor resorts to séance connections with Theo. Sir Aubrey diverts himself with scholarly research, becoming obsessed with documenting the history of the money-hemorrhaging estate that’s been in his family for 300 years. Theo’s sister Phyllis, largely liberated by her brother’s death, flees Ellinghurst to lead an independent life in London. His other sister, Jessica, soon follows, but opts to exploit her youth and good looks to find a well-placed husband.

Where does Oscar Greenwood fit in this picture? He’s a cuckoo in the Melville family nest. As a boy, he was a frequent visitor along with his widowed mother. Born Oskar Grunewald, the son of an exiled German composer, he’s precociously gifted in science and mathematics. (“Oskar could not explain how he felt about numbers,” we’re told, “except to say that they were his friends.”) At war’s end, his Melville connection only grows stronger. He stays in busy correspondence with Sir Aubrey, who gives him Henry’s library. While at Cambridge, Oscar also conducts a fevered, clandestine romance with Phyllis.

Rather than simply dismissing the spiritualism Eleanor falls for, Clark keeps finding disorienting parallels between it and the science of the day. Even Oscar has to admit that wireless radio technology seems like “a kind of magic, a door opening to worlds concealed behind worlds.” As is her habit, Clark draws on identifiable historical sources for story elements that at first seem pure flights of fancy. One personal touchstone for Oscar and the Melville family is an unreinforced concrete tower on Ellinghurst’s grounds, constructed by Sir Aubrey’s grandfather while in supposed psychic consultation with Sir Christopher Wren. (Susceptibility to spiritual contact seems to run in the Melville family.)

This tower is based on a real 218-foot-tall edifice in the New Forest village of Sway. The brainchild of a barrister-­spiritualist (ostensibly designed with input from Wren), the Sway tower is a folly in which engineering skill and supposed telepathic contact are in unlikely harmony. The delusions built into this tower and the world of Ellinghurst may not withstand rational scrutiny. But, as one character asks, “When did the really important things ever make sense?”

Clark’s descriptive powers provide deep pleasure, whether she’s sounding humorous notes (the disdainful young Jessica sees teenage boys as “pimply, raw-­looking creatures, hardly more than starter mustaches with manners”) or evoking the Christmas gloom at Ellinghurst after Theo’s death: “There was no music, no singing. Death filled the house like dirty water, muffling sound.” She resorts a little too readily to stock phrases, especially when it comes to the state of Oscar’s heart, which aches, turns over and, on one occasion, flips “like a landed fish.” Still, Clark is genuinely insightful when she’s depicting people transformed and exposed by loss.

“Things happened that made them see that they were not quite the people that they had thought themselves to be,” Jessica realizes late in the book. “They shifted inside their skins, tugging, smoothing, finding a more comfortable fit.” In tackling yet another complex historical era, Clare Clark has herself found a shrewdly “comfortable fit.”