Adam Roberts
Datura Books, 14 November 2023
Available as: PB, 400pp, audio, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 978-1915523020
I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with an advance e-copy of The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate to consider for review.
It was an unexpected treat to have a new book from Adam Roberts, and as we move into the season of Christmas ghost stories what better than one with a whiff of the uncanny, a story set in Victorian London - and a London beset by unease and coming change?
In 1848, much is in flux. Across Europe, revolutions and revolutionary movements swell. Even in Britain, the Chartists agitate. At the same time the new railways are redrawing the map of London, and of the wider country. Roberts catches a moment when these things are in process, but not complete, where the future is uncertain. The Middlemarch Grand Congruence Railway is imagined, and being built, laying waste to swathes of Camden, but it is not yet a reality. Despite the bustle of progress, many of the journeys taken in this book are on foot, by stagecoach, on horseback or in carts. Political agitators push the People's Charter and are seen as firebrands, radicals, though pursuing an agenda which to modern eyes seems a very modest step towards democracy. There is a great deal of "Dickensian" atmosphere (and Roberts plays games, dropping in characters and events from Dickens, and from other 19th century novels) and language but also a sense that this is looking backwards. In another strand of the story, literary ideas are formed from the fantastic, from the dawning of science fictional ideas. It all produces a feeling of dizziness, a loss of certainty, a sense that anything might happen.
The novel opens with the death that gives it its title and this event is, like much here, uncertain. We're given many alternative explanations for Sir Martin's - the chief architect of the railway company's - death, from murder at the hands of mobs of disaffected agitators or citizens whose homes and gardens he's seized, to some kind of supernatural, devilish influence, to others even more fantastic. But as Sir Martin's own character proves slippery - his deeds contradictory, both a grasping Scrooge of a man and also a philanthropist - so does the reason for his death. Both end up as ways into the fantastically complex society that's being built, which is explored by two men seeing to understand what happened to Sir Martin. These are Bryde, an engineer, and Holmes - Vavasour Holmes, father of the more famous Sherlock.
These sleuths can't though be detached from the events whirling away here, but are picked up and jostled by the forces at play. Indeed there's a whole subplot where Holmes is spirited away to Middlemarch itself, making this not just a London novel but one engaged with progress and resistance across the whole country.
It's a truly absorbing read, a detective story - complete with a Scotland Yard Inspector, of course - but also plenty of bustling Dickensian figures - sneering company grandees, pernickety clerks, loquacious women serving soup, servants at inns who clearly imagine themselves as central characters in a narrative not walk-ons as here. It's a deeply literary mystery, not just in its atmosphere and characters but in the way it examines the world and in the alternative theories it considers for the accomplishing of the central murder. This was, it's clear from the start, intended to be a spectacle, and a puzzling one - but that doesn't mean there isn't a perfectly human motive behind it, even if it's obscured by the means adopted.
I loved the atmosphere here of an uneasy 19th century, not a self-satisfied, grand edifice but a society very uncertain of itself, not a place blessed with the perspective of hindsight at all but a fractious, provisional, turbulent society people by fractious, turbulent people.
A truly enjoyable read.
For more information about The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate, see the publisher's website here.
No comments:
Post a Comment