Review of Lyndsay Faye's Jane Steele

Years ago, I went through a period when I read tons of Victorian novels. There were times they drove me crazy, when the young female lead endured endless abuse from all quarters and then was finally saved by some guy, often one who hadn’t previously been particularly nice to her himself.

I know it was the Victorian era, when women had very little power, but I couldn’t help wanting to shake these women and tell them to stand up for themselves. Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele (G. P. Putnam's Sons, March 22, 2016) is like wish fulfillment for me. Jane Steele is a version of Jane Eyre, but with 21st-century updates, like overt female sexuality, anger and vengeance.

When I first heard about this book, what I heard was that it was a satire of Victorian novels in which Jane Eyre is a serial killer. Really? I wondered if it would just be a spoof or some kind of mashup. Or maybe a dark twist on the original. It turns out to be more and better than any of those things. It’s fun and sometimes very funny to see the new spirit Faye breathes into her Jane Eyre-ish character. But it’s also elegantly written, in a style true to the era, just infused with a bit more modern sensibility and wry wit.

Jane Steele’s story doesn’t track Jane Eyre’s either. Sure, there are lots of parallels, but this novel has its own plot. And what a plot! It ranges from the danger and squalor of London’s streets, to a country house filled with secrets, to the exoticism and intrigue of the Punjab. There are deadly feuds, false identities, hidden treasures and even romance. It’s packed with action, atmosphere and emotion and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are even possibilities left for a sequel. In the meantime, I'm thinking I need to go back and read some of Lyndsay Faye's earlier titles, like her Timothy Wilde series, set in 19th-century New York, which has three titles: The Gods of Gotham, Seven for a Secret and The Fatal Flame.

Note: I received a free advance reviewing copy of Jane Steele from the publisher, through Amazon's Vine program. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites, under my usernames there.

Image sources: goodreads.com, quotesgramcom.

More Holiday Fare

Hubby and I plan to spend Thanksgiving with friends rather than relatives this year. By now, I'm so accustomed to a family holiday dinner that's akin to pro tag-team wrestling, I barely remember how one eats in a relaxed and civilized setting. This time, I won't sit down while beaming mental death threats to the Tactless Relative and silently pleading with the Always-Leaves-the-Table-in-a-Huff Relative. During the meal, I won't keep a foot cocked for delivering an under-the-table kick to my husband, who inevitably brings up the one topic I specifically warned him against, or take part in the traditional political discussion that degenerates into yelps and yells.

Instead of a fateful family dinner destined to burn itself into our memories, perhaps this Thanksgiving can include a discussion of memory, probability and destiny, and free will and fate––and the books that deal with these topics.

One example is Natasha Pulley's intricate first novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (Bloomsbury USA, July 2015). We tag along with Nathaniel Steepleton, a Home Office telegraph clerk in 1883 London. We take side excursions to Japan during the Meiji Restoration and Oxford, where we meet young physicist Grace Carrow, chafing under the restrictions society and family place on her research into the propagation of wave-based light, and her suave friend, Akira Matsumoto, who is related to the Japanese emperor.

These people are all linked through Keita Mori, a London watchmaker originally from Japan, whose talents involving time go far beyond his abilities to make enchanting clockwork devices. (I would kill to own Mori's little clockwork octopus pet, Katsu.) One of Mori's products, an exquisite pocket watch, mysteriously appears in Thaniel's room and enables him to escape a Fenian bombing without injury. Is Keita behind the bombing? And, in general, is Keita a good or bad guy, and what does it mean to become close to him? Like clockwork, Thaniel and Grace maneuver to answer these questions––and others about the nature of loneliness, love, and loyalty––in a hybrid of mystery/steampunk/speculative fiction. The atmospheric setting includes Victorian methods of detection, the struggle for women's suffrage, Gilbert and Sullivan music, and the experiences of Japanese immigrants in London. The puzzles of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street's characters and plot reveal themselves slowly, but, for the reader who is willing to wait, what you'll discover is a charming and thought-provoking read.

Review of David Morrell's Murder as a Fine Art

Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

In the 1850s, laudanum, a tincture of opium, was available without prescription in England and used to treat everything. Pain, the common cold, the faintness women experienced from wearing corsets to make 18-inch waists and hooped skirts weighing 37 pounds to hide the movement of their legs. While a few doctors recognized that prolonged use of laudanum created a dependency, most people viewed its overuse as a failure of fortitude. Such a failing was a secret to keep behind the heavy curtains of a Victorian living room. It certainly was not to be made public, as Thomas De Quincey does in his shocking bestseller, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Publication of his "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" did his reputation even more damage. In that series of satirical essays, he describes the two sets of Ratcliffe Highway murders, which terrorized England in 1811, as "the sublimest in their excellence that ever were committed."

It's no wonder, then, that De Quincey, in London with his youngest daughter Emily to flog his latest publication, comes to the attention of two policemen investigating a linen-shop murder of five people. The crime, which opens David Morrell's Murder as a Fine Art, replicates De Quincey's detailed description of the first Ratcliffe Highway murders. This begins a desperate game of wits between "the artist of death" and De Quincey, who grapples with his laudanum addiction while he and Emily assist the police.

In a city of almost three million, Detective Inspector Ryan and Constable Becker are part of a force of only 7,000 men. Violence in London isn't uncommon, but murder is rare and multiple murder almost incomprehensible. They conduct an investigation at a time when taking plaster casts of footprints and preserving a crime scene are new ideas, but fighting crowds who want to view the scene and assault suspicious strangers and foreigners, particularly the Irish, are old problems. It's critical not only for London, but the British empire, that this crime, which recalls the nightmares of 43 years ago, be solved quickly.

Ryan and Becker aren't nearly as well fleshed-out as the uninhibited De Quincey, a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the unflappable and resourceful Emily. The policemen serve mostly to reflect Victorian society in their attitudes about De Quincey's use of opium, his frank talk in front of Emily and Emily's modern bloomers and insistence on accompanying the men everywhere. They are bewildered by De Quincey's wish to analyze the crime by using Kant's ideas about perception and pre-Freudian ideas about the subconscious and memory. After a while, almost nothing De Quincey and Emily do can shock them.

I liked De Quincey and Emily and enjoyed the background story of the opium wars between China and Britain. I was fascinated by the rich description of Morrell's Victorian London. Sewage flows into the Thames, livestock roam the streets, Dr. John Snow only recently proved that cholera is caused not by breathing foul air but by drinking contaminated water. Touching patients is left to surgeons, who are lowlier than physicians. Lord Palmerston, Home Secretary and the country's most powerful man, is called Lord Cupid by people who live on the street. Fifty thousand beggars are ignored because if they're noticed, something should be done to help them. Every day at the Coldbath Fields Prison, prisoners climb 8,000 steps on a treadwheel to power the laundry facilities and "earn" food by spinning a crank in their cell 10,000 times to fill and then dump a cup of sand. (Clearly, the Victorians were into punishment rather than rehabilitation.)

This is the London that Morrell, best known for his creation of Rambo in First Blood, brings vividly to life. There is plenty of action and suspense and a fair amount of graphic violence. The villain is psychologically interesting. I recommend Murder as a Fine Art, published on May 7, 2013 by Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, to people who enjoyed Caleb Carr's The Alienist, Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman or Charles Palliser's The Quincunx. On my list of things to read, I'm putting De Quincey's "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" and The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 by P. D. James and historian Thomas A. Critchley. It's sad to consider how unthinkable multiple murder was to 1811 London and how thinkable it is today.

Book Review of Tabish Khair's The Thing About Thugs

The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair

A young man sits in an old house in an ancient town in Phansa, India. It is his grandfather's house and, though it is no longer anyone's home, it is alive with memories and stories. In one of his grandfather's books, he finds sheets of letters, written over a hundred years earlier, by a man named Amir Ali. The young man, our principal narrator, tells us what Amir Ali wrote, and tries to fill in the gaps to provide the rest of the story.

Amir Ali is a young man in India when he meets Captain William Meadows, an enthusiast of phrenology (the notion that skull shapes and measurements reveal intelligence and even character). Because of certain events affecting his family, Amir Ali spins a yarn for Meadows, telling Meadows that Amir was a member of the notorious Thuggee Cult, a band of cutthroat murderers, but has now seen the light of the reason and morality brought by the British to the lowly Indians. Meadows is persuaded to take Amir back to London with him, where Meadows exhibits Amir to various scientific society meetings and takes down Amir's long Thug story for the book Meadows is writing, titled Notes on a Thug.* Meadows is anxious to use Amir as a weapon in his war against his chief phrenological rival, Lord Batterstone, whose ideas are far more extreme.

Amir is a keen observer of Victorian London, with its teeming streets, strict class differentiation and racist attitudes toward the many people of color coming to London from Britain's far-flung empire. Amir expresses his thoughts in the letters that the young man finds in Phansa. The letters––never sent, since they are written in Farsi––are to Jenny, the servant girl Amir has fallen love with. Amir's Thug story is presented in the book's excerpts from Meadows's Notes on a Thug. We also read a narrative about a trio of grave-robbing criminals and other members of London's underclass of opium addicts, street performers, prostitutes, and even sewer dwellers called Mole People. On top of those multiple story threads, with their different styles, the book includes excerpts from newspaper articles written by a hack journalist named Oates. It was a little confusing at times, as I moved from one storyline to another but, after awhile, I got into the rhythm and style and went along for the ride. And what a ride it was.

After a deliberate start, the pace accelerates when a series of gruesome killings––complete with beheadings––rocks the city. The sensationalist press proclaims that no Christian could be responsible for the killings; they must be attributed to the riff-raff slipping into the country from "Hindoostan" and other parts of the empire, with their "strange rites and heathen customs," "extreme political views" and "devilish practices." Oates theorizes in his newspaper that the killer must be an "Oriental cannibal," and Amir Ali soon finds himself the key suspect in the murders. Of course, his story about being a Thug is the prime piece of evidence against him. It seems all of London is out for blood, and the police are happy to assume, with no investigation, that he must be the killer. Amir and his underclass friends must crack the case on their own, before Amir finds himself dangling at the end of a rope or torn to shreds by a mob.

Tabish Khair's book is a kaleidoscope of styles: florid Victorian novel, musty pseudoscientific article, tabloid-style sensationalism, historical mystery and police procedural. But that's just part of the story. Khair uses all of these styles to point a finger at the British imperialist attitudes of the Victorian era. Complaining of the "burdens of empire," one clubman says, "We ship them civilization and they ship us problems." Enthusiasts like Batterstone and Meadows use junk science like phrenology to justify notions of their racial and class superiority, which underpin the era's colonialism. These attitudes are so pervasive and unexamined throughout British society that Meadows's cook proclaims that the members of the working class, of which she is obviously a member, are all untrustworthy.

Tabish Khair

Khair's lesson about colonialism could have been dull and didactic but, instead, he has fun with it. Amir Ali's story about his supposed life as a Thug and his recognition of the superior wisdom, morals and reason of the English are comically over the top but, of course, it's taken as gospel by Meadows and his self-satisfied ilk. The grave-robbing criminals bamboozle their betters, and Amir and his friends run rings around the professionals put in charge of the serial killer/beheader case.

Amir is a thoughtful and appealing hero, and the depiction of his love story with Jenny and friendship with his motley crew of compatriots is heartfelt and memorable.

Congratulations to Tabish Khair on this genre-bending, colorful novel.

The Thing About Thugs will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 24, 2012.

* Presumably, Captain Meadows and his book––as well as Amir Ali in his fictional Thug persona––are based on Philip Meadows Taylor's 1839 novel, Confessions of a Thug, about a character called Ameer Ali. The novel was a sensation in England when published, and popularized the modern use of the word "thug."

Note: I received a free review copy of The Thing About Thugs.