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Tag Archives: Crimean War

Muck and Murder: Absence of Mercy

31 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1857, anti-James Bond, book review, class-consciousness, Crimean War, gritty locale, historical fiction, intricate plot, mystery, New York City, reverse snobbery, S. M. Goodwin, Tammany Hall, turf wars, vulnerable detective

Review: Absence of Mercy, by S. M. Goodwin
Crooked Lane, 2020. 305 pp. $27

In April 1857, Jasper Lightner, star detective of the London police force and keen student of scientific methods, faces a crisis that threatens his career. His obdurate father, a duke who’s found fault with his second son forever, believes that Jasper’s chosen profession stains the family escutcheon. But since His Lordship can’t deter his wayward progeny by cutting off his allowance — an aunt has conveniently left Jasper a sizable legacy — he applies political pressure instead. The duke gives Jasper an ultimatum: leave the police force or go to (ugh!) New York and teach the colonial upstarts how to sleuth properly, if he likes.

Jasper doesn’t particularly like — his imperious valet, Paisley, likes it even less — but our hero accepts the journey as an adventure. What he doesn’t know and couldn’t possibly anticipate, no sooner has he landed than he realizes he’s walked into a snake pit. Not only does every copper in the city resent him on sight, whether for his nationality (they’re Irish), reverse snobbery about his class, or because they believe that the interloper will expose the incredible corruption they take as their right.

The nonstop political turf war, with gangs, Tammany Hall, and rivalries within the force, may turn violent any second; woe betide the newcomer, who can’t know whose toes he’s just stepped on. And oh, by the way, someone’s cutting through the ranks of the city’s wealthiest men, killing them in copycat fashion, with garrotte and knife. The mayor wants these murders solved yesterday.

Absence of Mercy, the first of a promised series, wades into this donnybrook with gusto. If you like complicated mysteries in which bodies fall by the day, perceptions change by the hour, and the gritty atmosphere could be packed into a ball and used to scrape rust, you’ll find your pleasures here.

A woodcut from 1870 shows the Criminal Court in lower Manhattan. The complex included an infamous prison known as The Tombs, built in 1835. The author of this novel portrays what it was like inside (courtesy Corporation of the City of New York via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But clever as the plot is — at times, too clever for me to follow — the most winning aspect of this novel is its protagonist. I’ve never encountered a detective like Jasper Lightner, and maybe you haven’t, either. You might suppose that a thumbnail sketch of his past reminds you of a cross-genre James Bond. Handsome? Check. Suave? You got it. Throw in his impeccable manners, refusal to rise to the insults that his legion of enemies hurls at him, and magnetism for women, and you’ve just about spelled trope. Do I need to mention that he’s a veteran of the Crimea, a survivor of the charge of the Light Brigade, and trained to become a doctor, only to abandon his studies shortly before completing them?

But hold on. This paragon stutters, badly, except in the rare moments when he allows himself anger. Paisley, his valet, scares him. Jasper’s former fiancée married his brother. He suffers nightmares because of that infamous charge, and he hates that Tennyson wrote a poem about it. He still carries shrapnel from the battle, and to dull his pains, physical and emotional, he favors madak, tobacco laced with opium. Most importantly, despite his social gifts, sensitivity, and kindness, he can’t abide intimacy:

Surviving childhood with the duke had been very much like protecting a castle from invaders. Over the years Jasper had become an expert at repelling attacks, repairing breaches, and strengthening defenses while he waited his father’s next offensive. Now, in his thirties, his castle walls were impregnable. Thanks to the duke, nothing — and nobody — could ever get close enough to hurt him.

Consequently, Jasper pulls you in thoroughly, and you’ll need that connection as your compass, because Absence of Mercy visits the most degraded locales in a filthy metropolis. Goodwin lovingly portrays the muck, stench, and horror of New York life for the teeming underclass less than a mile from Fifth Avenue, but who might as well inhabit another planet. Life’s hard, and a man like Jasper, who believes in justice, has his work cut out for him.

Aside from occasionally losing the threads tying motive to crime and the timing of who said or did what, when, I find this novel absolutely engrossing. Every once in a while, the diction slips, as Jasper speaks like an American, whereas his American assistant, a detective improbably named Hieronymus (Hy) Law, talks like an Englishman. But despite that, Goodwin’s a careful writer with a gift for creating vivid scenes and a sense of history, for the narrative takes place during the years of the Fugitive Slave Act, which figures in the story and puzzles our English protagonist.

If you go along for the ride, don’t be alarmed if the odd detail puzzles you. Let yourself be swept along, and you’ll be rewarded.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Exposing a Hoax: The Wonder

27 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1859, anti-Irish prejudice, book review, Crimean War, Emma Donoghue, Great Famine, historical fiction, historical resonance, Hungry Forties, Ireland, nineteenth century, overdetermined character, superstition, withholding secrets

Review: The Wonder, by Emma Donaghue
Little, Brown, 2016. 320 pp. $16

It’s summer 1859, and Elizabeth (Lib) Wright, a nurse who worked under Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, arrives at an impoverished Irish village tasked with observing a medical phenomenon. An eleven-year-old girl, Anna O’Donnell, has reportedly taken no food for four months.

A committee that includes the local physician has hired Lib and another nurse to watch the girl, day and night, to be absolutely certain that no one’s feeding her in secret. It is generally assumed, even by the good doctor, that they’re witnessing a miracle. Why, young Anna, who claims to exist on manna from heaven, might even be a modern-day saint! Wouldn’t that put the village on the map? And so it would seem, for pilgrims are already beating a path to the O’Donnells’ door and leaving donations—strictly for charity, it’s said.

But Lib, an atheist who believes in what she can observe, thinks she’s observing a hoax, one perhaps encouraged by the local priest. Or maybe the girl herself has taken odd notions into her head. Either way, however, the committee has ordered the nurses to play sentinel but derive no inferences from what they see, a remit that grates on Lib. And as she comes to know Anna a little, she believes the girl is following her faith, yet fears for her and wishes she could learn what’s driving her exactly, or the adults who might be pushing her.

I like this premise, and how Donoghue uses it to plumb Irish folkways, religious beliefs, and moral standards as well as English disdain and misunderstanding. The O’Donnells represent an archaic, dying Ireland, amid still-fresh evidence of the Great Famine of 1845-49, while Lib stands in for the English modernists who would take a carbolic-soaked sponge to the island and scrub out superstition, if only they could.

James Mahoney’s drawing for the Illustrated London News, February 1847, of two starving Irish children near Skibbereen, west Cork (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Unlike her countrymen and -women who twiddled their thumbs while Ireland starved, Lib refuses to let Anna do the same. You have to admire the layers here, of historical resonance, cultural clash, and the personal stakes of a child at risk. Further, as befits her protagonist, Donoghue’s storytelling voice is spare and direct, and she turns small moments into large instances of “no — and furthermore.”

Yet The Wonder almost founders halfway through, I think because of an authorial decision made all too often these days: to imbue a protagonist with such strident singularity, setting up the greatest obstacles possible. I don’t mean to single out Donoghue; she really is a fine writer. But this novel typifies the narrative risks in manipulating the reader’s perceptions to serve a story.

By giving Lib every conceivable English prejudice against the Irish, the novel skews against her. “What a rabble, the Irish,” she thinks. “Shiftless, thriftless, hopeless, helpless, always brooding over past wrongs.” Having studied the Great Famine and written about it, I recognize that many English people held these views around that time, which contributed greatly to the catastrophe. But by withholding key facts about Lib’s past, therefore failing to develop her inner life, Donoghue lets her protagonist remain shallow and keeps me at a distance. Portraying her in broad, overdetermined strokes may or may not give her a steeper mountain to climb, but at a price—halfway through, I almost gave up reading.

Once you learn Lib’s secrets, though, she wins you over, so completely that I feel manipulated and have to wonder whether the secrets have been withheld because of their shock value. If so, why write character-driven fiction, which this is, and allow your plot to shackle the protagonist to a false impression? The shock doesn’t even accomplish much.

Also, Lib’s an odd mix of sophistication and ignorance. The narrative never says why she’s an atheist or how she came to that, but has she really never heard the phrase manna from heaven? At first, I figured that Donoghue (or her editors) feared that some readers might not have heard of the Exodus story—odd, but you never know. However, how Lib learns about the manna, told at length, suggests otherwise.

She also has to have the Great Famine explained to her. Apparently, during the famine years, her own concerns absorbed her so much that she didn’t even read a newspaper. But the blight that killed Ireland’s potatoes destroyed those in England and on the Continent as well; those losses, and a succession of failed grain harvests, gave the era a singular nickname, the Hungry Forties. Rife with revolution, hardship, famine, and protest, the decade’s upheavals were absolutely deafening. If Lib slept through that, I wonder how she didn’t sleep through the Crimean War.

Consequently, for a long stretch, she comes across as a straw protagonist, made of intentionally weak stuff. That causes unfortunate ripples, because, by the time she brings her inner resources to bear, the narrative has to rush through a couple crucial emotional transitions, less plausible for that, and which muddle an otherwise satisfying ending.

The Wonder has an original premise and perspective, and I had hoped to find more artistry in its execution.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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