It is 1721, and the city of Lisbon - alive with the scurry of English merchants, businessmen, and traders - has become a veritable gold mine. The Britain of George 1 is glorying in its new-found hegemony, is now considered to be the world's leading commercial power, its citizens descending on the Portuguese city, setting up trading stores and bargaining with the local merchants for riches from as far away as the Brazilian and African colonies. Regardless of its newfound trading wealth, Portugal remains staunchly Catholic with religious doctrine strictly enforced. Non-believers and anyone suspected from deviating from the faith is either imprisoned and tortured or burned at the stake by the unwavering puritanical "familiar" of the Inquisition.
The Protestant English, often considered circumspect, are branded as heretics, but they are allowed to live and work at leisure. Protected by the powerful machinations of King George and the commercial wealth of the colonial empire, they profit from the local merchant class and look down their noses at the puritanical ways of the Catholic ruling class.
Adam Runaway is not sure what to make of all this when he arrives in this turbulent city from London, ostensibly to take up a position working as a clerk for his Uncle Feliz Hathaway, but also to try to restore the family fortune that was devastated the previous year by his father.
Young and naïve, Adam is plunged into the local society of British merchants, hoping to better himself, by aspiring to the rank of the merchant class. Upon taking a room in local hostel, Adam is immediately drawn to a woman of great personal style and indeterminate age, Maria Beatriz Hutchinson. Maria Beatriz and her English born father have fallen on hard times and have been forced to peddle homemade religious woodcuts on the street outside their apartment.
Given immediate success to his uncle's fellow merchants, Adam also meets the beautiful Gabriella Lowther. Gabriella, the daughter of one of Lisbon's most wealthy English merchants, makes Adam at least for the time feel as though he is "indifferent to danger." But Adam unintentionally ends up threatening Gabriela's sweet-hearted innocence.
Distressed and fraught, he seeks comfort in Nancy, his deliciously charming young cousin, while unbeknownst to him; his uncle's treacherous head clerk Bartolomeu Gomes threatens Adam's rise to the top. Adam is surprisingly ignorant about Gomes and about Portugal, and he often comes across as imprudent and full of folly, but he's also surprisingly loyal and tenderhearted.
The Machiavellian Gomes plots to steal Felix Hathaway's fortune and considers the English accursed; to him, they have come across the sea uninvited and are using their money and the threat of military might to steal the wealth of poor Portugal. Determined to destroy Adam, Gomes has him expelled from his uncle's firm. And Adam is thus forced to clear his name, win his true love, and hopefully regain his fortune.
Author Peter Prince has written a sprawling and meticulously researched novel that is set against a rough-hewn, and cosmopolitan panorama. Lisbon is a thriving metropolis, full of wealth and where riches from the farthest corners of the globe are traded and bartered. It is also a city that exists under the forbidding bulk of the Inquisition Palace, black and undecorated, as if to remind the poor wretches who are under its jurisdiction that their frolics and endeavors are only baubles of a moment and that what it offers is for eternity and probably death.
The author cleverly weaves history, fiction, and humor into a heady and engrossing tale of love, death, and money. Catholicism and Protestantism meet with an uneasy truce as wealth rules the day, and the Inquisitors play off the superstition and the unnamable fears of an ignorant public.
Prince's episodic, gauzy storytelling can often demand feats of literary stamina, but like the journey of Adam, from London to Lisbon, and then back to London again, Adam Runaway has the power to deliver readers to strange, exciting, and exotic new territories. Mike Leonard August 05.