My Mister Porter used to say, Ever day you wake up you got to ask youself what is it you huntin for.You can certainly tell that Steven Price, author of By Gaslight, is a poet as well as a novelist: not because his writing is florid or artsy, but because his word choices are just so precise; his descriptions evocative; his sentences rhythmical, punchy, masculine. In this historical epic, we readers are deposited in the filth and muck of the 19th century, witness to some of that era's most gripping events, and through it all, are encouraged to ruminate on the limits of justice and revenge, love and grief and duty. Despite weighing in at over 700 pages, this story flew by too quickly, the central mysteries keeping me intrigued right to the end. By Gaslight is a thoroughly satisfying read. (Because this is an ARC, my apologies if these quotes aren't in their final form.)
He was not the law. No matter. In America there was not a thief who did not fear him. By his own measure he feared no man living and only one man dead and that man his father.By Gaslight is told from two alternating points of view: In the first, we meet an American detective who has come to London in order to tie up some loose ends he discovered in his recently deceased father's journals. If only he could find Edward Shade – a conman so successful and shadowy that even London's flash underworld speaks of him as part myth – William could close the case and return to his home and family. The best lead he finds is a Charlotte Reckitt – a rumoured grifter in her own right – but pinning her down proves difficult.
Only the soft-headed think a thing looks like what it is.In the second storyline, we meet Adam Foole: an international businessman who is returning to London after receiving a letter from that same Miss Reckitt; a woman he had loved and been conned by a decade earlier. Although Foole has been known to deal at the edges of the law himself, he soon realises that the best way to find Charlotte is to team up with the American detective. There is much dramatic irony as the reader learns what these two characters are hiding from one another, and as the story progresses, we discover that their lives have intersected in more ways than even they are aware of.
While that is, loosely, the plot, By Gaslight also deals with: the American Civil War (and the early Secret Service that each side utilised to infiltrate the other's lines; and the use of hot air balloons in airborne surveillance); scenes from the Underground Railroad; tense tales of bringing Wild West outlaws to justice; the dangerous Boers and their South African diamond trade; London's opium dens and sewers, full of muckrakers and Berserkers; a seance; early CSI-type forensics; the brutal British penal system; and a peek inside the walls of Scotland Yard. This book is a mystery, a thriller, a love story, a sting. There are numerous stories of orphans and, whether in America or England, the horrifying conditions that poor children were forced to live under. There are overworked, bony horses everywhere, a slick of muck on every cobblestoned street, waifs in rags begging for coppers, and hanging over all, the sallow orange glow of gaslamps (made sicklier in London by its persistent, chilly, soot-filled fog). These stories are exciting, shocking, and gloomy – and with the characters always tired and grimy and uncertain, the atmosphere of the whole thing made me anxious (which is a useful state to be in when reading a long mystery; I kept reading and reading in the hopes that something would improve or resolve itself).
He closed his eyes and he saw. A quarter century had passed and still he closed his eyes and saw. Darkness like a fog pouring over frozen cobblestones. The creak of chains sawing from hooks in alleys, eyes in the shadows stagnant and brown as smoke. He could smell the rot around him. A clatter of iron-shod hooves on stone, crowds of men wending between the omnibuses in silk hats and black cloaks and whiskers. He was walking. He was walking with his powerful shoulders set low and his fists like blocks of tackle and it was dusk, it was night, he could just make out the silhouette standing under the gaslight waiting. The face was turned away but it did not matter, he knew that one well.I don't know if I'm left 100% satisfied by the central mystery (and its misdirections and redirections) in By Gaslight, but the story is so interesting and the writing so perfectly suited, that my overall reading experience is completely positive. Berserkers in the sewers! Aeronauts doing recon! Dickens in the reading room? What's not to like?
The 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Andrew Battershill : Pillow
David Bergen : Stranger
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Kathy Page : The Two of Us
Susan Perly : Death Valley
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush
Steven Price : By Gaslight
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People
*Won by Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Not really a surprise, but this is how I ranked the shortlist, entirely according to my own enjoyment level with the reading experience:
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People
