In John MacLachlan Gray’s sophomore effort at historical fiction, we are once again presented with journalist Edmund Whitty as our protagonist (one hesitates to label him a hero), roaming London in search of solvency, a good story, and now his dead brother’s secret. Gray’s England is less complex in White Stone Day than it was in The Fiend in Human, but no doubt the reader is meant to fill in some of the blanks based on information supplied in that previous novel. In exchange for this less fully-drawn England, Gray gives us a much more interesting and complicated mystery (or rather, criminal endeavour, as there is very little mystery as to who is doing what to whom; what remains to be revealed is if the guilty parties meet justice, and how) and characters with much more depth and psychological realism. At three hundred and thirty-nine pages, White Stone Day most likely comes close to achieving the maximum page count that most thrillers can support (I think it could have gone on a bit longer, if only to expand on London’s underworld and Mrs. Plant’s public house, but I am a reader uncommonly fond of long books), but it remains taut, exciting, surprising, and at times even funny, although laughing at a book like this gives one the same sort of pause that one gets when laughing at one of Humbert Humbert’s word games. The novel is, after all, about Victorian child pornography.
Did I not mention that earlier? Ah, dear me. When I read about the Victorians, either in novels like this, in their own writings, or in reference works and histories, I cannot help but be fascinated by their ability to not only reconcile but actually unite their obsession with innocence and the public good with their shocking, unprecedented talent for brutality. Edmund Whitty’s experience in Millbank Prison, an institution apparently inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, is more horrific than nearly any modern penitentiary I can conceive of, not just in degree but in kind. Cruel and unusual ain’t even in it, as Lucky Jack Aubrey would have said a generation earlier. The character of Reverend Boltbyn seems inspired by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and indeed some of his photos of young Emma are strikingly similar in form and content to those Dodgson is known to have taken of young Alice Liddell. Gray is talented enough to make the similarities telling, but ultimately superficial, and Boltbyn takes on a compelling life of his own. It is from Boltbyn that the book’s apt (but somewhat misleading) title comes, and it’s also in Boltbyn that we can see the Victorian confusion about how to place children in their notions of sexuality, a confusion that seemed to have been resolved by the time Nabokov wrote about Humbert Humbert and his lovely Lo, but that any casual observer of contemporary visual media (films, television, magazines, music videos and album covers) should be able to tell is alive and well. Child pornography is the perfect subject for a crime novel set in Victorian England, where pornography was invented, child-brothels (indeed, all brothels) flourished and notions of childhood innocence constantly collided with the cult of fertile youth and the realities of its sexual exploitation.
If I had to list a single complaint about this book (and really, it’s quite a mild one), it would be that in White Stone Day the scurrilous Mr. Whitty is at his heart a good and moral man, and his rough, amoral exterior is merely a shallow veneer applied to keep the appearance of the genuinely amoral Whitty from The Fiend in Human. The Captain, keeper of the rats and operator of London’s premier ratting establishment is far more genuinely Victorian in his distress over his missing niece, while at the same time importing little girls to work as slaves in his own brothels. Whitty is as sickened as the reader is when he first encounters child pornography (by which I mean in the novel; this reader has certainly never encountered child pornography, and hopes he never does), but one can’t help thinking that the Whitty from The Fiend in Human would have reacted with a more genuine Victorian indifference to the plight of what must obviously be “unfortunates”. Perhaps associating Whitty with the reader’s moral outrage is the only way to deal with the subject in a historical novel, and it certainly adds to the thrill, but it rings as slightly inauthentic (Patrick O’Brian, the master of historical ficiton, had to tread this line with Jack Aubrey and the issues of slavery, but was unflinchingly accurate in portraying Jack’s attitudes; only the socially abnormal Maturin was allowed to share the reader’s distaste). Still, White Stone Day is a triumph that I did not want to end, but nor could I put it down, and I have no idea if he will write another Edmund Whitty tale. I do hope he does. Gray has a third historical novel out, but its main characters are Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens, and I frankly don’t often care for historical novels that use genuine historical figures as major characters. It’s simply too difficult to accept.
That being said, I am of course going to immediately contradict myself by reading Louise Welsh’s Tamburlaine Must Die, a historical crime novel featuring Christopher Marlowe as its protagonist. I have been suffering from a bad sinus cold these last few days, and it turns out that while literary fiction confuses me in such a state, I have no difficulty at all following historical mysteries or adventures. Onward!
