D. J. Taylor
KEPT
A Victorian mystery
431 pp. Chatto and Windus. £16.99.
0 7011 7895 7
James Dixey, a nefarious Norfolk squire, schemes to marry his mad ward, the widow of his friend Henry Ireland, in order to secure her inheritance and pay off his debts to Mr Pardew, a shady moneylender. As well as having his hooks into Dixey, Pardew is involved in planning an audacious train robbery. Dixey is a naturalist and obsessive collector, whose interest in the widow, Isabel, is perversely erotic as well as mercenary. He keeps her sequestered in his isolated, crumbling manor house, visited only by a sinister mad-doctor and a curate with Doubts, and guarded by a kennelful of dangerous dogs; he also keeps a wolf in a none-too-safe enclosure. (No prizes for guessing the wicked squire’s fate at the end of the novel.) One of his servants, Esther, befriends Isabel, but eventually leaves for London to join another former servant, William, now a member of Pardew’s gang. Meanwhile, Isabel’s relatives attempt to discover what has become of her, but are thwarted by Dixey’s close-mouthed lawyer, Mr Crabbe, who is also linked to Pardew’s dodgy business activities. One cousin goes off to the Canadian wilderness where he nearly succumbs to the extreme cold and a hungry wolf. (This is not, of course, the same animal as the one in Dixey’s enclosure – that would make the plot seem absurd.) A sagacious detective, McTurk, is on the trail of the train robbers and also suspects that Henry Ireland did not die a natural death . . . .
D. J. Taylor’s “Victorian mystery” is the latest example of a strong trend in “serious” fiction towards historical subjects. There has always been a market for swordplay and bodice-ripping – what James Manallace, the hack writer in Kipling’s late, dark masterpiece “Dayspring Mishandled”, cheerfully calls “gadzooking and vitalstapping” – but writers such as Sebastian Faulks (Human Traces, nineteenth-century psychiatry) and Caryl Phillips (Dancing in the Dark, early twentieth-century “blackface” minstrel shows) are not in the business of supplying it. Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides challenges readers to a heavyweight bout over 1,400 pages of seventeenh-century Mexican poetry, religion and sexual anguish. This spring we are promised (in order of historical chronology) the ageing Rembrandt (in Sarah Miano’s Van Rijn), eighteenth-century alchemy (in Katharine McMahon’s The Alchemist’s Daughter), a fictionalized life of Vivant Denon (in Lee Langley’s A Conversation on the Quai Voltaire), a “tangle of madness, ghosts, sex and lies” in Victorian Scotland (in Jane Harris’s The Observations), and “an epic novel of Russia on the eve of revolution” (in James Fleming’s White Blood). These books are all from major publishing houses, and their authors, whether debutants or veterans, presumably take themselves seriously (although Harris’s book does look as though it might be quite fun). But too often the problems of writing historical fiction haven’t been thought through, particularly when the novelist is engaging in any form of pastiche.
The Victorians themselves were divided as to the value of historical fiction. They knew perfectly well that the novel’s natural terrain was that of contemporary life, but they were haunted by the colossal, though faded, figure of Scott, and driven by the exhortations of Carlyle (whose French Revolution has a claim to be a better historical novel than any of the novelists managed).
Every major Victorian author tried his or her hand at the genre, among them Dickens with A Tale of Two Cities, George Eliot with Romola, and Thackeray with Henry Esmond, which Trollope thought the greatest novel in the
language. In Henry Esmond, Thackeray went further than his peers by adopting the style of the period he was evoking: the novel is a memoir from the time of Queen Anne, and not only did Thackeray attempt to reproduce the mentality of that period, he also imitated its literary style, drawing on his knowledge of, and affection for, the great English essayists and comic writers of the eighteenth century. Not only that, but the first edition of the book was itself a pastiche, set in a “period” typeface and printed without illustrations.
Thackeray was a great writer, but even he had problems controlling the tone of a story which is supposed to be the product of a century or more ago. And Henry Esmond is told in only one voice, that of its hero, who does not, of course, set out to imitate the individual writers of his own day. D. J. Taylor has set himself a far harder task. Kept is told in a medley of third-person narrative, letters, diaries, newspaper reports and other “documents”. The plot and narrative method take after Wilkie Collins (spiced with Conan Doyle and Mary Braddon), but the medley is also stylistic. Mr Crabbe, the lawyer, derives from Tulkinghorn in Bleak House, one of many Dickens pastiches; there is a man-of-the-worldly, buttonholing Thackerayan narrator, a Trollopian junior civil servant, a Brontesaurian madwoman in the attic, and other antediluvian types; McTurk do the police in different voices (Mr Bucket and Sergeant Cuff among others); there is a diary entry by George Eliot, and an article from Household Words; the Yukon episode is a Jack London short story. Clerkenwell slums out of Gissing; servants courtesy of George Moore; general narrative duties undertaken by a sort of composite of them all.
Is the book a playful postmodernist exercise, exposing the artificiality of “realist” fiction? No, as with other modern instances it takes itself too seriously for that: its themes of secrecy, obsession, madness and crime are heavy-handedly signposted, as are the connections between the different parts of the plot. Yet the patchwork method means that it cannot be, as the blurb claims, a “dazzling re-invention of Victorian life and passions”, since there is no unifying perspective from which the jumble of incompatible styles can be made meaningful.
In this sense the very literariness of the novel works against it.
Nothing in it is lifelike, only booklike; character, scenery, dialogue, narrative voice all “perform” Victorianness and seem only to want to catch your eye. Indeed Kept’s one constant is the appeal it makes to the reader for recognition and appreciation of its own technique. Over 400 pages this becomes a wearisome pleasure, and it would be so even if the Victorian pastiches were word- and pitch-perfect. But pastiche of any historical idiom is fiendishly difficult, and the golden rule is to keep it short. Manallace, the hack writer of historical fiction in Kipling’s story, ends up forging a “lost” Canterbury Tale as part of a revenge plot against a Chaucer scholar. The plot backfires, but not because the scholar sees through the forgery; Manallace has had the sense to produce no more than a fragment. In a work as long as Kept, anachronism, infelicity and downright error may be unavoidable, but they still grate and their cumulative effect is to shake one’s faith in the author’s grasp of his period.
Taylor has written a biography of Thackeray, and must be assumed to know his way around Victorian institutions and social culture; why then does he call his detective “Captain McTurk”, allocate him successively to the City Police and the Metropolitan Police (they were entirely separate forces), call him at one point a “commissioner”, though he is clearly an investigating officer, and speak of him receiving a parcel from the “police captain” of a provincial force? Why does he tell us that, though Isabel’s father had been a “literary man”, he might still be considered a gentleman, because “Dickens had called at his house, and duchesses pressed him to attend their parties”? (The absurdity of this conjunction is all the more evident because Taylor knows perfectly well that Dickens was looked down on for not being a gentleman – another character says so later in this novel.) At the other end of the social scale, in shabby, dilapidated Tite Street (“King’s Cross Station half a mile away and Somers Town hard by”: it has migrated from Chelsea), there are children who “play at nine-pins on the area steps or make cock-shies in the corners of gloomy court-yards”, yet these barely respectable urchins have “nurse-maids” to look after them, as though they lived in Mayfair. (Perhaps it is the result of Tite Street’s unstable climate: it is “a bitter February day” on page 39, and “a grim, grey day in November” on page 40.)
Taylor’s narrative voice is equally susceptible to false notes. He evidently thinks that it is very Victorian to begin a description thus:
“An onlooker who had studied his passing, here on this grey January afternoon beneath a darkling sky, would perhaps have noted that . . .”
He uses this device dozens of times; even in the example I have quoted it sounds odd (how do you study someone’s passing?), but when used to describe events taking place on the shores of a Highland loch in the middle of the night (“A passer-by chancing to peer through the boathouse window might have thought . . ”), it is plain silly. Many sentences contain vocabulary, turns of phrase, idioms which seem intended to produce a “Victorian” effect, but which sound like translations from another language. “He browsed impressionably for a moment on the crowded pavement”; “Dewar’s troubles were far from vanished”; [Mr Pardew] went off to eat his dinner in the Folkestone Harbour Hotel, where he pecked up a beefsteak . . . delved elaborately into his trouser pocket”. Whole sentences simply beggar belief:
“And then there came to Captain McTurk a stroke of luck of the kind that were it to arise in a work of fiction would have mesdames and messieurs the critics wagging their fingers at its improbability but that is nevertheless a welcome concomitant to many an official inquiry.”
I do not wag my fingers, but I throw up my hands. The real mystery of this “Victorian mystery” is – as Trollope might have said – Why Did He Do It?
