Streets of London
You can expect a lot from any Booker short- lister and here, in her 14th novel, Michele Roberts gives us a lot. Too much perhaps? Her prose pants with the weight of description; no adjective is left unturned and her characters pace along within a splendid confusion of senses.
The book takes the form of a double narrative, chapters alternating between Victorian London in 1851 and the same part of the city — Walworth in Southwark, just south of the Thames — in 2016.
Joseph Benson, a dutiful husband and father of four, is the Victorian London protagonist. Once a police clerk with a developed sense for reading people from their demeanor, he is now employed by journalist and social reformer Henry Mayhew. ( Mayhew’s real- life magnum opus
London Labour and the London Poor still stands its ground in the pantheon of British sociological history).
It is Benson’s job to locate and interview prostitutes about the minutiae of their lifestyle and the author gives him free reign to move among the city’s fabric — the bombast of colour, texture; the fetid smells of free flowing sewage, soot, tanning leather, dirt, dead rats, fresh baking, sour bodies drenched in cheap perfumery, sweet fragrance of flowers; a cacophony of sounds — raucous, brassy, clattering. It’s all rush and bustle out there.
In his search for reliable informants, Benson is directed to the home of a Mrs Dulcimer in Apricot Lane. She runs a boarding house for variously fallen women — a Madam then? We wait to see. Mrs Dulcime is an enigma. An alluring West Indian lady, about 50, well spoken, seemingly highly educated, respectable and respected and very canny. She is an arresting character, the most beautifully drawn in the book. The author keeps her appropriately at arm’s length, providing the reader with just enough — but it is little wonder that Benson is attracted to her and eventually finds himself gathered into life at Apricot Lane.
London 2016 is brought to us through the eyes of 60- year- old Madeleine, a former English professor and unabashed wearer of black fishnet stockings and mini- skirts. Since her redundancy she has developed an interest in the sociological work of Mayhew and a penchant to explore the lives of street walkers of Victorian times. By chance she moves from central London into a tiny flat in Apricot Lane, at one time the kitchen of the boarding house where Mrs Dulcimer and her brood resided.
Early in the book Madeleine comments thoughtfully to a friend “the lives of people in the past may co- exist with ours, invisibly through a looking glass.” And so it is that when she moves to Apricot Lane, her presence acts as a catalyst for activity by the ghost and spirits who are trapped there.
On first read it is easy to overlook this foretelling, buried as it is among so many goings on, and fail to realise it is the nub of the book. But a second read ( I found this essential) reveals how cleverly the author has interlocked the principal characters of Victorian and modern London, honouring the seemingly haphazard events of the book as a focused and carefully planned execution.