Journalist Edmund Whitty, the dissolute protagonist in John MacLachlan Gray's gloomily atmospheric mystery,
The Fiend in Human, knows how to feed the public's appetite for lurid sensationalism. His latest success is Chokee Bill, "The Fiend in Human Form," a diabolical caricature of the serial strangler who's been attacking "women of low character" in 1852 London, ending their lives with white silk scarves. However, the arrest of coiner William Ryan for these crimes threatens to cool demand for Whitty's work--and thus deprive him of the income he needs for lodging, gin, and opium. So when he's approached by Henry Owler, an impoverished but proud balladeer, who hopes to ring a "last confession" from Ryan before his hanging, Whitty sees the chance again to best his competitors. What he doesn't expect, though, is for the stranglings to continue, raising doubts about Ryan's guilt and leading him--in the interests of his own pocketbook, of course--to turn detective in search of the factual fiend.
Gray, a Canadian columnist and playwright, captures Victorian London in the breadth of its grandeur and decay, shining an especially bright but sympathetic light on the city's outcast populace. A destitute woman here eyes a stray cat, "mumbling to herself that there walks two pounds of meat." An executioner's "facial pores appear to have been pricked repeatedly with pointed sticks." Pursuing his investigation, despite warnings from police and others, leads to Whitty being "thrown headlong from [a] swiftly moving carriage" and having an irate rat stuffed down the front of his trousers. However, this egocentric scribbler considers the pain worth the price, as he goes on to confront an unconvicted murderess, enlist a daring prostitute in searching for the suspicious owner of a silver flask, and face the scorn of his professional brethren--all to prove that Ryan isn't Chokee Bill, after all. Or is he? The Fiend in Human resolves this mystery amid elegant prose, frequent bursts of wit, and integral commentary on the failures of the press that reveals just how little has changed in a century and a half. --J. Kingston Pierce
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
John MacLachlan Gray's new novel is a mystery with a Victorian noir setting and a plot clearly designed to remind readers of Jack the Ripper and more recent serial killers, both real and fictional. Inevitably books of this kind lead to complaints by reviewers that the characters are not sufficiently deep, and that the plotting isn't as good as the down-market stuff available at twenty-four hour convenience stores. The slums of Victorian London are in some ways the main character in this novel, and the plotting proceeds through a series of bravura set pieces.
In any action-oriented story, characterization is going to depend less on depth and more on typology. The hard-bitten journalist of The Fiend in Human, addicted to alcohol, laudanum, assorted Victorian drugs, and especially the truth, is a type we have seen before, as is the tough but sympathetic editor, the fallen woman who still believes in love, the over-confident con man, the reptilian pragmatist of a police investigator, etc. All that the reader asks is that clichés be satisfyingly reinvented. Here Gray delivers and in spades. The novel opens by reproducing journalist and protagonist Edmund Whitty's piece on a recent hanging at Newgate. His prose style is witty and mordant indeed: "Let it suffice to note that Walden's hanging is an eventuality akin to a long-standing infection laying claim to a voluptuary." Whitty's editor, Alexander Sala, has a cynical but accurate understanding of his newspaper's market:
"Speaking of the dead, tremendous crack on the hanging piece, old boy, trenchant and vivid. Plays to the morally superior, while fulfilling the demands of sadistic voyeurs who missed the show. Delights and instructs and all that. Condemns a thing while marketing it at the same time. Should be taught in school as a model of journalistic balance."
Gray's description of the freelancer scuffing and calculating his way through the defenses of an editor who is sympathetic but also keen on self-preservation is very nicely done.
Gray has also done an outstanding job of presenting historic London in all its dirty vitality. For example, here is Whitty in a cab:
"The velvet cushions, worn shiny by a thousand trousers and the pomaded hair of a thousand heads, are powdered with cigar-ashes. He notes a theatrical pass-check under his feet, and the dirty fingers of a white kid glove stuffed down the back of the seat.
He hears a babble of voices, excited, angry pleading, a not-quite musical roar like the sound of a large marriage party, or a political gathering, or a livestock auction."
One of the problems in this novel, though, comes precisely from its clever tone. There doesn't seem to be much distance between the implied narrator and Whitty, the ironic, over-educated and medicated Hunter S. Thompson analogue. This sets up an emotional distance between the reader and the action and characters that leaves a feeling of detachment from Whitty and any of the other characters. The third person subjective (will not be clear what is meant by subjective) that Gray uses is subjective mainly in its adopting Whitty's ironic tone, causing a pastiche effect:
"Thanks to the modern approach, English children no longer scurry beneath gibbets by the roadside on their way to school, nor do their parents take weekly pleasure in the public flogging of their neighbours; instead, a scientific programme of silence, solitude, the treadwheel, as well as flogging and blistering where necessary, improves these disfigured souls, out of public sight."
If it were not for the deliberate distance that Gray puts between the reader and his characters, it's hard to say whether the novel's reliance on set pieces would be an issue. There is still a sense of suspense in the book that provides forward motion through the plot, but the novel reads as if overly aware of itself as social history and as a repository of well-crafted set pieces. Given especially that Steven Marcus covered a lot of this same social history so brilliantly so many years ago in The Other Victorians, the extra helping of irony here does not turn this material into a completely successful genre novel. Having said that, there is clearly a market for this kind of book; Gray's agent has already sold a sequel to this novel titled A White Pebble Day. Pleasant as it is to see Canadian writers cashing in, my advice is – wait for the paperback.
Maurice Mierau (Books in Canada)
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