Bloomsbury £12.99 pp278

The great prophets of mankind, according to the historian AJP Taylor, are remembered for a single book. Tom Paine, the Trotsky of his day, is remembered for three. Common Sense, a vigorous denunciation of all monarchies, was the pamphlet that sparked off the American revolution; The Rights of Man nearly put him behind bars in England for defending the French right to revolt; and The Age of Reason, written in a French prison after he refused to endorse the execution of the king, caused the most uproar of all.

Had it not been for The Age of Reason, Paine might have died heaped with all the honours America could offer. He should have done. But this was the book in which Paine queried Christ’s divine status. Christ was a good man, Paine wrote, but he was not God’s son. So, no Holy Ghost. Paine wasn’t the only founding father who didn’t believe in the Trinity, but others were prudent enough to keep quiet. Benjamin Franklin, whose letter of recommendation had given Paine his first opening in America, admitted that he went to church because to do otherwise was political suicide. Paine, the plainspoken son of a Quaker corsetmaker, was incapable of such hypocrisy. “My own mind is my own church,” he wrote; elsewhere, he sweetly summarised religious duty as “doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy”.

Paine paid a terrible price for his candour. James Monroe, the American secretary of state, rescued him from execution in France and brought him back to America in 1802. That, essentially, was all that Americans were prepared to do for the man who inspired them to fight for independence, who passionately opposed slavery and who, in his day, was regarded as the country’s saviour. Denied a state pension or even the right to vote, Paine died in poverty seven years later. His funeral was attended by five people. Refused burial by the Quakers, his body was hurriedly dropped into unconsecrated ground in a Long Island field.

And then?

The story of Tom Paine’s bones is one of the oddest I’ve read. Paul Collins, hopping to and fro across the centuries in his hunt for the missing remains, has cooked up a witches’ brew of weird characters, rum locations, nuggets of history and spoonfuls of political theory. The result, while mildly dissatisfying for Paine fans, is sparky, entertaining and unexpected. The spot on which Paine actually died, for example, is now the site of a gay karaoke bar called Marie’s Crisis. Before then, Collins reveals, the bar was a deli. “Imagine that: Edwardians buying ham sandwiches and devilled eggs where a Founding Father once fell. It’s almost as strange as belting out show tunes over the spot.”

Well, is it so odd? The real weirdness would be in finding that the house in which Paine died, neglected and despised, remained intact. This aspect of Collins’s book, the wide-eyed wonder at finding that changes do happen over 200 years, is hard to swallow.

It is in the breadth of reading — biblioholic seems the proper term for a man who consumes books faster than a dog swallows strings of sausages — and in the gravity he brings to a ludicrous quest, that Collins comes into his own. As an eccentric, he matches up to some of the keepers of Paine’s last earthly relics.

The sanest and the most interesting part of this treasure-hunt tale is also the best known. William Cobbett, starting a long career as a political pamphleteer in Philadelphia, made Paine the prime target of his furious invective. Imprisoned for libelling somebody else in 1810, Cobbett read Paine on finance and realised, with horror, that he had been abusing a man whose views he shared. Nine years later, he made amends. Paine’s bones were dug up by a penitent Cobbett and brought back to England. Great things were planned: a route strewn with flowers, cheering throngs, an annual dinner and even — despite the fact that nothing remained of Paine’s head but a skull — special souvenir rings alleged to contain a few threads of the great man’s hair.

Nothing happened. In England, Paine’s name was still being vilified. No funds were available to honour an enemy of religion and the monarchy. Cobbett, discouraged, stashed the remains away. His son, after engraving his name on the skull, sold the last of Paine to a London tailor, who kept the bones in his workstool.

This is the point at which Collins takes flight. The search for Paine’s bones becomes a narrative of eccentric characters, led by Moncure Conway, a former preacher whose hunt for the relics became a lifelong obsession. Trailing behind Collins and Conway we hop from encounters with Emerson and Whitman, to Darwin, a survey of earth-closets, a brief digression on the Muggle-tonians (very harmless, very mad) and off to Dr Hunter’s Museum in Gray’s Inn. Could Paine have ended here? Collins has high hopes: “Given that it boasted the Bishop of Durham’s rectum among its holdings, surely the Hunterian would have found a spot on its shelves for Tom Paine’s head?”

On the other hand, the bones might have been sold to one of the rag-and-bone men whose collections were ground down for chemical manure. It hardly seems to matter; Collins has found a new topic and he is keen to tell us all about Egyptian mummies, sought after in Victorian London because they could be turned into high-grade pigment for paints.

There are moments — quite a few of them — when Collins’s book descends into a bewildering collection of random journeys and encounters that seem to be going nowhere. At the end, however, all comes together. A headstone honouring Paine turns out to be still in use as a hitching-post for a saddle in a Long Island garage; a big brass head cast in Paine’s honour and currently situated at the side of a road holds the best-kept secret of all: a box containing a blackened walnut that was once a brain.

To catch the flavour of The Trouble with Tom, you need to know that what really interests Collins about this discovery is the direction in which the monument’s eyes are turned. Across the street, a television flickers in a window. So this, Collins muses, is how Paine spends eternity, staring at a popular gameshow in a suburban house. It’s an amusing idea; like the book, it doesn’t quite work.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £11.69 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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websites:
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/
Brief biography and his complete works

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