2008-08-14 Disappointing

I quite like DJ Taylor as an essayist and TV talking head, and I love Victorian mysteries, so when I came across this I reckoned it couldn't go wrong. It was a terrible let-down. In spite of the title there is not really any mystery at all, and despite the story being told from a dizzying variety of multiple viewpoints not much in the way of plot when you get down to it - and of the minor puzzles there are, several are simply not explained by the end. The climax is given away on the first page and not even fleshed out later.

The book is padded out with far too many scenes of characters schlepping around London on irrelevant or uninteresting errands, and vignettes that tell us things we already know. While there's no lack of Victoriana, and every locale is duly described as being miserable and dreary-looking, there is a deficiency of atmosphere. It is more an intellectual exercise in pastiche than a living novel and far too down-to-earth and mundane: a great detective who has been built-up offstage turns out when he finally arrives to be incredibly bland, and is enabled to unravel the case by a stroke of luck, of which the narrator slyly remarks that it would be tutted at in a work of fiction - well, yes. At another point the (unnamed but intrusive) narrator wryly notes the tendency of the novelists of the period to romanticise London types into loveable comic characters - 'London has been discovered'. One smiles, but the book would have benefited from a 'character' or so of its own.

In fact the book comes to seem like some pointless post-modern exercise in deflating the genre and thwarting the reader's expectations. A character one anticipates is going to be become the hero does very little even to advance the story. We are treated to an interminable chapter describing another character traipsing through the Canadian wilderness in some peril of his life - one has stopped expecting a hero by this point but assumes he must at least be vital to the plot. But no, he is promptly abandoned, re-appears when everything is wrapped up, does nothing and goes away again. A mistake by a keycutter hampers a villain's scheme, and renders the preceding ten pages spent obtaining the keys pointless. At times it is like that kind of arthouse fiction that deals in the things that happen in the interstices between the scenes of a normal story, the things that are usually and rightly kept offstage.

Wilkie Collins is a notable absence from the list of Victorian authors Taylor acknowledges as an inspiration in an afterword (although one of the villains has a pet mouse, perhaps a nod to Count Fosco, if so an entirely inappropriate one as the man in question has none of Fosco's intelligence, menace and charisma) and a touch of Collins is exactly what the novel lacks: a dash of romance, and above all a well-constructed, imaginative and exciting plot.

I imagine Taylor simply wasn't interested in writing the kind of book I had expected from the title. But what he was trying to do eludes me and I found the results unappealing. Even as a collection of slice-of-life Victorian scenes it is too superficial and fragmented to engage. If you're looking for a true homage to the great Victorian mysteries, get hold of 'Fingersmith' or especially 'The Quincunx'.