A chase through foggy London
While not historically accurate, exciting city is a background for drama
Vancouver Island author Steven Price ends his 731-page doorstopper of a sophomore novel with curious disclosures.
“There are many excellent non-fiction accounts of the early Pinkerton Agency, the Civil War, and the lives of criminals in Victorian London. This is not one of them,” he writes. And: “The gaslit London of (this novel’s) pages never existed.”
Encountering that latter sentence, readers might experience a moment of confusion. After all, they’ve just submerged themselves — for days — in a huge book that begins with a section subtitled “1885 London.”
If Price’s late-Victorian setting (the menacing city of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Markheim,” an 1885 story that inspired him to write Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) “never existed,” then in exactly what have they been immersed?
If one strand of the historical novel aims for verisimilitude via careful research and factbased accuracy, another less reverent branch — from “Gone with the Wind” and “Interview With a Vampire” to “Tipping the Velvet” — doesn’t adhere to the same scruples.
In them, the historical setting serves as a kind of picturesque background effect for a riveting drama. Feral tunnel dwellers called berserkers and high-stakes criminal scams choreographed on the fog-shrouded Thames? Yes, please. The fall of Khartoum and violence in Ireland culminating in the defeat of William Gladstone’s Liberal government in a vote of no confidence? Not so much.
Writing fiction (which is to say making up stuff ), Price expresses no qualms about invention. Here, he’s writing an entertainment, which to be successful, has its own set of rules. It’s a departure for him: his previous works include the novel “Into That Darkness” and poetry collections, two of which, “Anatomy of Keys” and “Omens in the Year of the Ox,” were award winners.
An engrossing throwback and clever revival of the Victorian sensation novel (a.k.a. the shilling shocker), Price’s darkly feverish page-turner is buoyed by inventive cat-meetsmice plotting, brooding, secretive and quicksilver characters, and vivid cinematic tours along dank cobbled alleyways, fetid sewage lines and gangrenous battlefields.
The novel also brings to mind Guy Ritchie’s style-conscious film, “Sherlock Holmes” — in late-Victorian London drag, yes, but not exactly a period piece. Price is no history teacher.
Excluding flashback sections, “By Gaslight” is set just three years before the 1888 Whitechapel murders.
The city’s Ripper-era reputation as shadowy, chronically fog-enveloped and deeply malevolent pervades the story.
Price regularly cranks the atmospher-o-metre to maximum too, to the point that if book club members play a drinking game based on the appearance of the word “gloom, “they can count on hospitalization for alcohol poisoning.
Vengeance, mysteries, resentment and assorted schemes animate the plot.
There’s an enigmatic, morally fluid beauty (who may or may not be decapitated), an aggressive and gruff visiting American investigator (who’s a Pinkerton National Detective Agency scion with colossal daddy issues), a gentleman thief with a broken heart, “eyes like amethysts pressed in wax,” criminal schemes with an artful flair and a scene-stealing pair of oddballs as his family of associates.
That primary threesome’s competing goals, ulterior motives and exotic pasts are seductions Price doles out admirably.
Intentionally or not, there’s a kind of gaslighting woven into Price’s tale.
While the term usually means psychological manipulation for immoral purposes, Price’s gaslighting has better connotations.
Despite the gravitas — the gruesome bumps in the night and Victorianism à la Sweeney Todd — he tells a sweeping, well-crafted chase story that remains compelling for more than 700 pages.
“By Gaslight” may not contain hidden depths or pry into Victorian social history, but there’s no resisting its gripping enormity.
Brett Josef Grubisic’s book “From Up River and for One Night Only” is out now. Special to the Toronto Star