BY GASLIGHT: Thumbs Up? Thumbs Down?

Fiction Crime is how this city works BY GASLIGHT By Steven Price 731 pp. Picador Reviewed by Sue Ellis By Gaslight is a masterpiece of fiction that imagines an event in the life of American detective Allen Pinkerton. When his father (the famous William Pinkerton) dies, Allen feels duty-bound to hunt down a man his father had been unsuccessful in finding. Young Edward Shade had been taken under the wing of the elder Pinkerton during the Civil War and trained as an operative under his command. Shade disappeared while on assignment. Using his father’s file on the subject, Allen leaves Chicago bound for London to contact agents employed by his abolitionist father some twenty years earlier, a former slave couple he’d helped to freedom. Their assignment: follow a London lead to Edward Shade. The setting is beautifully surreal, 1800’s London at her sooty and melancholy best. The story is partly told from Allen Pinkerton’s straightforward account, run-on sentences as impatient as his wish to wrap-up the job and sail back home to his wife. But as the days accumulate, he finds himself sucked into the frustrating workings of the corrupt city, elevating his frustration. The head of Scotland Yard counsels Pinkerton that: Crime is how this city works. Some folk steal to stay alive. Other folk find employment replacing what gets stolen. Others sell the stolen goods back out and all this keeps the little folk alive.  At just over seven hundred pages, By Gaslight requires commitment, but it is superb in its resurrection of place and time—battlefields of the Civil War including an air balloon team who act as aerial spies, and thrilling chapters on the capture of an American train robber. The scope of the plot expands beyond the manhunt revealing the complicated relationship between fathers and their offspring, and the bonds we form with found family. Save this one for long winter evenings and let the effortless poetry of Steven Price make him one of your favorite writers: Foole’s glance from the halted cab was casual and haughty as if merely double-checking the address. But in its stonework he saw balance and rigour despite the gaudy columns added to its entrance, already pitted and soot-stained, wrong in a false Italian style and garish like brass earrings on a young beauty. The stone blocks of its facade were large, the masonry deep, on the wide sills stood low sharp iron railings like an invitation to a burglary. He smiled cheerfully and Molly smiled back. The windows were lit and shining through the rain and he could see even at that distance the bovine shapes of ladies ascending the steps and moving through the rooms two by two like visitants to some foundering Ark.  The last chapters of By Gaslight are both touching and surprising, neatly wrapping up this most unusual and satisfying novel. I’d recommend this book to anyone.

Fiction  Soot stains and grime BY GASLIGHT By Steven Price 752 pp. Picador Reviewed by Eric Petersen  Canadian poet turned novelist Steven Price is back with his second novel, a work of historical fiction set in Victorian London. Before receiving my copy, I’d heard about this book, with other reviewers singing its praises, some even comparing it to Dickens. I beg to differ. Oh, how I beg to differ. London, 1885. Two very different men have come to the city for two very different reasons, and their paths will cross in ways they never could have imagined. Or maybe they could. William Pinkerton, the eldest son of Allan Pinkerton, legendary detective and founder of America’s most famous detective agency, has come to London to catch a master criminal – the one man his recently deceased father was never able to apprehend. His name is Edward Shade, and he’s a legendary con artist, thief, and swindler. Adam Foole is also a master criminal. He’s come to London along with his partners in crime Japheth Fludd, a hulking ex-convict and master thief, and Molly, a spunky little girl whom he passes off as his daughter. Actually, Foole rescued her from the squalid orphanage where she’d been trained as an expert pickpocket and made to work as part of a crew of thieves. And so, Foole and his “family” travel from place to place pulling off cons, swindles, and heists, but they haven’t come back to London for that. Foole has received a letter from Charlotte Reckitt, a woman whom he hasn’t heard from in ten years – a woman he’s never forgotten, as she was the love of his life. She still is. Meanwhile, William Pinkerton begins pursuing the only lead he has in the Edward Shade case, searching of one of Shade’s accomplices – a woman named Charlotte Reckitt. He finds her, or rather, pieces of her, when parts of her dismembered body are pulled out of the Thames. When Adam Foole learns of Charlotte’s untimely demise, he’s devastated and faces a tough decision: leave now or find out what happened and risk getting himself and the closest thing he has to a family caught by the authorities. He knows full well that the son of America’s greatest detective is also on the case and will stop at nothing to get his man. The chase through London’s dark underbelly is on... By Gaslight paints a highly atmospheric, darkly poetic, and meticulously researched portrait of Victorian London. The characters well defined and compelling. Unfortunately, the novel is ultimately sunk by its nearly unreadable narrative. The author has chosen to abandon traditional grammatical structure to the point that there are no quotation marks, dashes, or anything else to separate dialogue from narration, as can be seen here, copied verbatim from the text:   William glanced past the chief inspector at the constable standing with his heavy helmet in one hand. Where’s Dr. Breck? He asked. Why don’t you have him take the girl apart, see what he can find. If there’s water in the lungs, you have a different sort of offence here.     Shore scowled. I’ll run my own affairs, thank you.    Okay. Mr. Stone, Shore barked at the young constable, Make certain Dr. Breck has a look at her. He turned back to William. You don’t think she might have been pregnant?       I don’t.     If she was pregnant there might be a man involved.     I’d guess so. What did you think of her? Her character, I mean?    He frowned and turned his glance away. He said, There was nothing wrong with Charlotte Reckitt twenty dollars wouldn’t fix. It just wouldn’t fix it for very long. He stepped forward, brushed her cold wrist. The flesh was spongelike against his own. He murmured, How does a woman jump from a bridge in the middle of the night and end up cut into pieces in different parts of the city by morning?    Your father would have had a theory.      William ignored this. Where are the legs? He said. What happened to her hair?  Reading passages of conversation between characters is even worse, as you try to figure out which one is speaking. Now imagine having to slog through over 700 pages of this! If you’re a fan of run-on sentences and comma splices, you’ll find a lot of them, too. The decision to abandon the basic rules of grammar was made for artistic purposes, but it comes off as clunky, self conscious, and pretentious. If you’re thinking that an audiobook version of the novel might fare better, think again.  Author Steven Price is an award-winning poet, but this dysfunctional marriage of poetry and prose just doesn’t work. Sure, he conjures up a lot of gorgeous imagery, but he ruminates endlessly on every tiny detail – every soot stain on every door, every inch of grime on the cobblestone streets, and of course he ruminates on the fragrances of urine and feces that constantly waft through the city in all their pungent glory. And the fog! The author’s descriptions of the coal dust choked London fog alone could fill up a novel. Added to an already bloated narrative, these elements slow the story down to a glacial pace as it jumps around in time and place en route to a flat and painfully predictable conclusion. It’s a shame, really, because somewhere at the heart of this dense, hard to slog through swamp of pretentious claptrap lies the makings of a great novel. Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com