Alex Grecian writes a wonderfully dreary Victorian thriller.

After reading one Victorian-like blockbuster, I decided to read another, but this one couldn’t be more different from D. J. Taylor’s Derby Day.


 

The Yard

The Yard (436 pages, Putnam, $26.95) is Alex Grecian’s novel recounting the early days of the Scotland Yard.  Just after the grizzly failure of the police to find Jack the Ripper, London is both angry with the police and ready to blame them for a lot of its woes.

Into this demoralized Scotland Yard, Grecian introduces three key characters.  The first is Walter Day, a young detective who has risen quickly in the ranks and finds himself running a case in which a policeman was dismembered and left in a trunk in the train station.  Day and his colleagues are baffled by the crime, and it does not help that several other detectives refuse to trust this young man and do things to make it harder for him to accomplish anything.

He does have a couple of supporters, though, and one is a rough and ready young constable called Hammersmith, who worked as a boy in coal mines in the north and has come to London to right wrongs, especially for children, when he can.  Another help to Day for fighting crime is a local doctor, Kingsley, who deplores older medical techniques and tries to introduce new ideas, like looking at fingerprints, into the detectives’ arsenal.

Dr. Kingsley is a wonderful character, and his morgue/autopsy room, with its utter disregard of issues like cleanliness and contamination—one has to shudder as the constable shaves with a razor that had been used to slit someone’s throat—offers a beacon of hope to the detectives who are dealing with far too many murders for their tiny “Murder Squad” to be able to handle.

This is not a mystery, really, because Grecian makes the murderer one of the many characters.  Instead, he offers a portrait of this psychopath and makes him even more threatening because of his maniacal need to keep his obsessions secret.

Grecian brings out vividly the life of the streets, and he does a lot to portray the true misery of nineteenth-century life.  This is not a novel for the faint of heart, but it is a rewarding tale and one that raises the hope that these characters might come together again in a similar seedy challenge to the sanity of London life.

The narrative is well-paced, and the characters are richly drawn.  The novelist struggles a bit at first to find his voice, but once he does, this novel is hard to put down.  This is Grecian's debut attempt at a novel: I hope we can anticipate many more!

Alex Grecian

The Yard is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

D. J. Taylor creates a rich and complex story of a horse race.

I read an enthusiastic review of D. J. Taylor’s novel, and when I looked for it, I realized what a prolific novelist I had stumbled upon.  I enjoyed this novel and will undoubtedly read a few more of his dense and beautifully conceived narratives.

Derby Day

D. J. Taylor’s Derby Day (416 pages, Pegasus, $25.95) recounts the build up for the annual horse race in Epsom Downs by looking at a range of characters at different social levels.  The result is a richly nuanced account of British society in the later nineteenth century.

Primary among the characters under consideration are Mr. Happerton and his wife.  Happerton is a gambler and an investor who buys up debt and then uses it to leverage purchases and financial pressure of various kinds.  He runs a dark and underhanded business and his father-in-law, a London attorney called Gresham, distrusts him and despises him.

Gresham’s daughter, Rebecca, perhaps modeled on Thackeray’s Becky Sharpe, from Vanity Fair, never gives too much away.  She marries Happerton because he intrigues her, and she is ready to throw her weight and her money behind his scheming and his manipulations.

Primary among these is his purchase of the race horse Tiberius, who is an odds-on favorite for winning the Derby that year.  Happerton is only vaguely slowed down in his pursuit of the horse by its being owned by a country gentleman whose financial affairs make him the perfect dupe for Happerton’s techniques; and before anyone really knows what’s happening, Happerton owns the horse and the estate while the poor owner can only apologize to his ancestors and feel a kind of desperation.

Happerton lives large, and he has a few friends, both men and women, that he tries to keep from his wife.  When he recognizes that she is willing to support him in whatever he does, he tells her a bit about the horse and what he is trying to do.  He also explains why he is trying to ruin the horse’s chances of winning: there is more money, he tells her, if the horse loses and he wins by betting on a long shot.

To make this all work, he hires a decrepit jockey and gets involved with  some low-life thieves who help to finance his ascendancy. These activities get more and more sordid, but when Happerton decides to take his mistress to the race instead of his wife, he makes a fatal mistake.

Happerton is the kind of character who has to be brought down, and he plays so fast and loose with the law that it catches up with him eventually.  How it does and what forces conspire to bring him down, D. J. Taylor does a lovely job in relating.

The end of the novel is satisfying as only a sprawling novel like this can be. D. J. Taylor writes a compelling tale with a very satisfying ending.  What more could we ask for?

D. J. Taylor

Derby Day is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

William Boyd writes another compelling thriller.

I liked Boyd’s most recent novel, and I have gone back to read some others.  This one is great.

Ordinary Thunderstorms

William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms (432 pages, Harper Perennial, $15.99) was published last year.  It tells the story of Adam Kindred, a handsome young British academic, who has returned to London from Arizona, where he got his doctorate and was working on a project concerned with seeding clouds for rain. 

He has just had a job interview and is feeling great about the world when, like other Boyd heroes, he is caught in a tailspin. Befriending a solo diner, he follows him home and then burst in on what is clearly a murder.  Before he escapes the scene, though, he does just enough to make himself a suspect.  So he takes the only sensible course: he runs.

He gets no farther than his hotel, however, when he realizes that he is being followed; and after some effects swipes with the dead man’s briefcase, he is off and running both from the police, who already list him as prime suspect, and the murderer, who has traced him to the hotel and is now after him once again.

Adam does what no one thinks possible in this day and age: he falls off the grid.  Hiding in a bit of waste ground by the Chelsea Bridge, he throws away his phone, avoids ATMs, and uses the little cash, at first what he had in his pockets and later what he gets by panhandling.  Once his beard grows in and he starts looking like a homeless person, he can get around fairly easily.

Of course, living on the streets as he does, he also comes in for some tough handling in some of the rougher ghetto districts, but he is almost miraculously befriended by a black prostitute, who is upset that he didn’t have any money to offer but nevertheless offers him a place to stay when the Chelsea spot seems compromised.

This woman has a young son whom Adam enjoys, and as he hides out in her flat, he and the boy become quite close.  Nothing is easy for Adam, however, and even though he’s managed to avoid the cops, some other toughs are hot on his trail.

As he runs and tries to put some kind of life together, he recognizes that some of the material he took from the guy who was murdered expose faulty drug trials that may be endangering the lives of young asthma sufferers.  This becomes a kind of crusade, and as he builds a case against the drug companies, his life starts to have new meaning.

This is a great moral tale, as the academic builds his life up again from the very bottom, but is also a nail-biting kind of thriller because Adam is often only a hair’s breath away from capture or exposure.

Boyd tells a wonderful tale here.  The ending is satisfying and everything that builds up to it is of a caliber that I can now come to expect from this fabulous writer.

William Boyd

Ordinary Thunderstorms is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

John Iriving writes a compelling tale of the coming of age of a bisexual writer.

When I read about this quasi-autobiographical tale from this major novelist, I didn’t hesitate to get my (kindle) copy.

In One Person

 John Irving’s In One Person (448 pages, Simon and Schuster, $28) tells the tale of young Bill (or Billy) Abbot, who is a barely prepubescent boy when the novel opens in the 1940s.  Billy is smitten with the local librarian, Miss Frost.  In her thirties and precisely elegant, she charms Billy with her demeanor and her small breasts, about which he fantasizes in private and even in early sexual play with his almost-girlfriend Elaine.

It does not take long for the reader to understand that Miss Frost is a transsexual, either a transvestite or a full male-to-female transsexual.  Billy does not see that the very features he describes are features that betray the sex-change: large hands, deep voice, strapping back, and so on.  But the sexual obsession—or “crush”—that Billy forms turns out to shape him irrevocably.

Almost as if to prove this before explaining Billy’s awakening, Irving offers scenes from Billy’s later life in which he is dating a transsexual or finding mannish women attractive.  And since this first attraction is to a woman who is also a man, Irving uses it to explain his character’s bisexuality.

While attracted to Miss Frost, Billy also almost dates his friend Elaine, has an abiding crush on a fellow student actor and wrestler called Kittredge, and finds himself the heart-throb to his high school classmate called Tom.

The first two-thirds of the novel, when Irving describes the high school experiences of these characters, as they come to terms with budding sexuality and act in high school drama productions, is wonderful.  The drama of discovering the full identity of Miss Frost reads almost like a mystery, and the effect of Billy’s relation with the librarian is truly powerful.

Also compelling is the tale of Billy summer in Europe with Tom.  The relationship between these two boys fails, and the failure is painful to watch; but it is nonetheless well-rendered.  These boys torment each other in ways that are as frustrating as they are inevitable.

After that, though, the novel feels to me a bit rushed.  It does deal with the AIDS crisis, and it handles beautifully the confusion of the early years of the eighties, when gay men were first learning about the illness as their friends died in profusion.  But by that point, many readers, like me, may have lost sympathy with Billy, who seems to feel that bisexuality is a curse, when it is really his inability to love any of the many people who took care of him as he used them for sexual adventure.  It is not Billy that is irritating so much as all those characters who emerged from sexual liberation to feel that they had been cheated.

The novel ends compellingly, though, and the tale of Billy Abbot is one that everyone interested in the later years of the twentieth century can read with interest.  Was it really like that? we may ask ourselves.  Yes, I think it really was.

John Irving

In One Person is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

William Boyd takes on war and espionage in 1913-1915.

I read a review of this latest novel by William Boyd, and it sounded great.  It turns out he’s written many more, and I may just have to read them all!

Waiting for Sunrise

Waiting for Sunrise (368 pages, Harper, $26.99) tells the story of the young and handsome Lysander Rief, who is making his way, in the footsteps of his illustrious father, as an actor in the West End in London in the early years of the twentieth century.  Lysander is a bit of a poet as well.  With a deep acquaintance with British Theater—he acts in Shakespeare and Strindberg in the course of the novel—and a literary bent, we are treated to delightful prose, snippets of Shakespeare and other playwrights, as well as a thoughtful narrative that sets a high standard for sophistication.

The novel opens, however, with Lysander in Vienna in order to consult with a colleague of Sigmund Freud’s about a sexual problem he has been unable to overcome.  His psychiatrist tries to get him to try various methods of overcoming what causes his dysfunction, but when he meets a British woman who is seeing the same doctor, he is immediately attracted to her, and before long they are having wild sex that more than proves that he has been cured.

Because this woman, Hettie, is involved with a Viennese man, Lysander is playing a dangerous game, and when the affair blows up in his face, he has a hard time even escaping from Vienna in one piece.

The British diplomats who help him escape, well-spoken and ironic in their ways, turn up again in London, just as the First World War is starting.  And they engage Lysander, who is a private in the Army, to take on a project that invovles traveling to Geneva and acting, or so it seems to Lysander, like a spy. 

He does this successfully, and then he is dragged into even more difficult challenges closer to home.  When Hettie pops up again, and he finds himself having to deal with his loving, but twice widowed mother, he has more than he can stand.

All along we hear about the theater and the people he knows there, and that theatrical background creates a welcome counterpoint to the war wounds and the espionage.

William Boyd has written an elegant thriller that does far more than other recent examples of this genre can do.  He paints a rich set of characters and puts them in complex relation to one another, and he informs us about the cultural context in which they were functioning in the nineteen-teens.  This is a wonderful accomplishment, and I look forward to reading Boyd’s other novels soon.


















William Boyd  

Waiting for Sunrise is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Edward St. Aubyn writes an epilogue to his Patrick Melrose trilogy.

I think of Edward St. Aubyn as a guilty pleasure, but they are wonderful novels, and I feel guilty only because they make me laugh so much.










At Last

Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last (272 pages, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $25) follows up with characters from his Patrick Melrose trilogy. I imagine that if you haven’t read those novels, some of the details of this one might confuse you. At the same time, though, you can catch on fairly quickly to the identities and relationships being described. This novel is such a delight that you might find your way into the trilogy by starting with this epilogue.

Patrick’s mother has died, and the action of this novel takes place during the one day of the funeral. To be even more precise: at least half the novel takes place at the funeral itself. Of course, characters flash back into their lurid pasts, and long held animosities are given the space to emerge naturally. Wicked characters we may remember form earlier novels are even more wicked, and perhaps a little demented, here; but old friends are still friendly; and family represents everything that is best and worst about the ways in which people can be loving and/or tormenting to each other.

For Patrick, a bundle of self-defeating neurosis, this is a chance to assess his relations with each of his parents. His Dad has been dead for some time, but the occasion of his mother’s funeral is the chance for him to delve into his past. And he does that with a vengeance, remembering horrifying scenes from his earliest childhood, some of which, like his at-home circumcision, may have been related to him by the mother he is mourning.

Patrick’s ex-wife and his ex-mistress are both there, exuding long-standing and perhaps understandable hatred for each other. His wife’s ex-lover, a loopy philosopher is there too, as are various friends and hangers-on, aunts, and even some old, old friends of his mother's.

In the last novel of the trilogy, a much loved French Riviera home had been left by his mother to a new age religious group, and when this novel opens Patrick is still brooding over this loss and blaming his mother’s dementia. The woman from this group has been asked to speak at the funeral—Patrick’s ex-wife Mary had to make the arrangements when Patrick couldn’t cope—and her much-interrupted funeral oration is a masterpiece of comically ironic prose. This character does not mean to be funny, but I defy you to read her touching account of a well-lived life without laughing.

You will have to laugh too at other characters and at the amazing descriptive pirouettes that St. Aubyn pulls off here. The novelist has been widely praised as a stylist, and the style is just about everything here. It’s the kind of prose you can sink into and marvel at from paragraph to paragraph. It’s almost addictive to read, and I imagine that it is addictive to write too. That gives me hope that there might be even more volumes of Patrick Melrose to follow. After all, two of the most amazingly charming and astonishing characters in this novel were Patrick’s two little boys.

  

Edward St. Aubyn  

At Last is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Hilma Wolitzer writes about romance in retirement.

When I read that this was a story about a widower who is dating in his sixties, I thought it sounded interesting.










An Available Man

In An Available Man (304 pages, Ballantine Books, $25), Hilma Wolitzer tells the tale of Edward Schuyler, a young sixty-something who lost his loving wife to cancer. After seeing her through the illness, he is exhausted when she dies, and his grief takes the form, as it often does, of his pulling back from the world and brooding over the past in utter privacy.

Edward has friends and family who won’t put up with this, however, and no sooner is he dragging himself unwillingly to a grief counseling group, than he finds they are trying to fix him up with friends and encouraging him to pull himself together.

One singularly unsuccessful venture in this regard is when his best friends, or rather when the wife of this couple tries to fix him up with a cousin of hers, both Edward and the woman, who’s called Olga, withdraw and resent the exercise. This is funny to read, perhaps because it will be familiar to anyone who has been on a “blind date.”

And as if this is not enough, his children—they are really his stepchildren from his wife’s first marriage—take out a personals ad in the New York Review of Books and delight in watching him sort through the responses, which are many, even if the dates that result are as unsuccessful as that first blind date.

While all this is going on, Edward thinks back to his first love, the woman who captured his heart and then left him standing at the altar. When she turns up in his dating pool, he is at first angry, but then they start to rekindle the love of their youth.

This is not the end of the story, though, and Wolitzer is not the novelist to end things this way, and she doesn’t.

What does happen is too wonderful to relate here—it would spoil the ending—but I can say that Wolitzer finds a way to give Edward a new life without his having to relinquish his memories. This is beautifully done.

What is also beautiful is the way in which Wolitzer creates the feeling of loss and emptiness that a man in his sixties might feel. Still alive and wanting to feel intimacy, Edward is unable to respond even when he wants to. All this is evocatively told, and I found this touching and memorable on the topics of love and loss.

Hilma Wolitzer

An Available Man can be purchased at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.