The Childhood of Jesus

It is as if the numbers were islands floating in a great black sea of nothingness, and he were each time being asked to close his eyes and launch himself across the void. What if I fall?— that is what he asks himself. What if I fall and then keep falling for ever? Lying in bed in the middle of the night, I could sometimes swear that I too was falling — falling under the same spell that grips the boy. If getting from one to two is so hard, I asked myself, how shall I ever get from zero to one? From nowhere to somewhere: it seemed to demand a miracle each time.

The first thing you need to know about The Childhood of Jesus is that it contains no character named “Jesus”: there may be loaves and fishes, a wish for the dead to rise again, and a virgin mother, but without a Jesus, you can assume it's all one big allegory, and if like me you don't get the allusions, it's a head-scratcher of a book that doesn't satisfy on its own straightforward reading. The other thing you need to know is that J. M. Coetzee is probably a literary genius, and as such, he likely doesn't care a bit if I, an average reader, can follow along. 

The book opens as a man and a young boy arrive in a strange land as refugees and seek shelter and information at the Centro de Reubicación Novilla. We learn the man's name is Simón, and on their ocean crossing, he assumed responsibility for the boy, David, when the youngster became separated from his mother. Repeatedly, Simón must stress, “Not my grandson, not my son, but I am responsible for him.” (And does this have something to do with Simon Peter's denial of Jesus after his arrest? The title urges the reader to look for such biblical connections throughout.) In this new country, everyone has been brought from away, somehow had their memories erased, have been assigned new names and presumed ages, and all are compelled to speak to one another in beginner's Spanish. At every turn, Simón is surprised at how helpful everyone is, yet also shocked by how dispassionate they are: helpfulness is based on a common sense of “goodwill”, but there is so little actual empathy that Simón and David are forced to sleep in the yard of an employee from the Centre on their first night, given nothing but bread and water for their dinner, encouraged to attend to their bathroom needs in the bushes. 

The town of Novilla seems to be some kind of Socialist Utopia (and a Spanish one at that, with a little boy named Fidel and a dog named Bolivar), where Simón and the boy are assigned basic accommodations in an apartment block, money is easy to come by but there is very little to buy, and Simón easily finds employment as a stevedore at the docks – a physically demanding job for which he is unsuited, but the goodwill of his fellow employees is such that no one minds if he can't shoulder as many sacks as everyone else: the goal is to work for its own sake and take pride in receiving a pay packet at the end of the week. Unlike those around him who seem to accept the culture of this strange land, Simón senses that things are missing:

It is true: I have no memories. But images still persist, shades of images. How that is I can't explain. Something deeper persists too, which I call the memory of having a memory.

Simón doesn't understand why everyone is content with bread and water (Man cannot live by bread alone), or why he's the only one who seems to suffer from sexual desire, or why no one eats meat or uses spices or questions the point of a gang of men emptying the holds of ships, day after back-breaking day, when a crane would be more efficient. Simón attempts to engage his coworkers in a philosophical discussion about the nature of work, arguing that history itself demands the evolution from manual labour to mechanised, saying:

Like you I crossed the ocean. Like you I bring no history with me. What history I had I left behind. I am simply a new man in a new land, and that is a good thing. But I have not let go of the idea of history, the idea of change without beginning or end. Ideas can not be washed out of us, not even by time. Ideas are everywhere. The universe is instinct with them. Without them there would be no universe, for there would be no being.

Obviously, Simón believes that he is challenging the others' thinking, but at this speech, the foreman invokes “The spirit of the angora”, asking if someone has a response to this. A younger man steps forward and speaks eloquently on the nature of reality, concluding, “'Which of us has ever had his cap blown off by history?' There is silence. 'No one. Because history has no manifestations. Because history is not real. Because history is just a made up story...History is merely a pattern we see in what has passed. It has no power to reach into the present.'” (It is revealed later that there is an Institute in Novilla where the citizens can take free courses and this young man studies Philosophy – yet when Simón attends a seminar he leaves in disgust because the lecture is on the chairness of chairs and the tableness of tables.)

Meanwhile, Simón believes that his purpose in Novilla is to reunite David with his mother (although neither of them would recognise her, neither even knows her name), and based on his feeling that he would simply know her to see her, Simón offers the boy to the first woman, Inés, that feels right. Simón installs Inés in his own apartment with the boy (where she infantalises the five year old by powdering his bum, installing a crib, and pushing him around in a stroller), and Simón takes on the role of godfather, trying to teach the boy to read from a child's abridged version of Don Quixote. (And here is an academic essay on Coetzee's use of Cervantes throughout his writing, and especially as it relates to Borges; which, with the Spanish Socialist Republic seen here, seems particularly relevant.) Because David seems confused about whether or not Don Quixote is actually battling giants or tilting at windmills, Simón explains that it can be read either way; from either Quixote's fantastical or Sancho's literal perspective (which seems a clue to reading this book?). But when David tries to make up his own stories based on the pictures instead of actually learning to read, Simón proclaims, “For real reading you have to submit to what is written on the page. You have to give up your own fantasies. You have to stop being silly. You have to stop being a baby.” (Which seems a clue to reading this book?)

When David turns six, they are forced to send him to school, but his refusal to learn to read and his “philosophical problems” with numbers tags the boy as a problematic student who would do better at a reform school. When Simón discovers that David can indeed read and brings him back to the school to show his teacher, the teacher is annoyed to have been tricked. When commanded by his teacher to write out the phrase, “Conviene que yo diga la verdad, I must tell the truth”, David instead writes, “Yo soy la verdad, I am the truth.” And this is why the teacher finds the boy unteachable: David has spent all of his schooldays being likewise mysterious and defiant. In order to avoid sending David to reform school, Simón and Inés escape with the boy from Novilla (a flight into Egypt perhaps?), and as they drive along, David encourages everyone they meet to join them in their new life; gathering disciples, as it were. The end.

In reading other reviews for The Childhood of Jesus, I see people mentioning all the great philosophers (from Plato to Dante to Voltaire) that are invoked by this book, and I suppose I would have gotten more from it if I recognised the references. I believe I got most of the Biblical allusions, but that only serves to highlight how weird this book reads as an interpretation of “the childhood of Jesus”: the spoiled and bratty David hardly seems like the Christchild, meek and mild. I picked this book up because the 2016 Man Booker Prize longlist was released this week and Coetzee's The Schooldays of Jesus has been nominated – as that book is the sequel to this one, I hope to at least have gained some scant basis for understanding it (when it is finally released in October). This book went over my head, and while I wish I could give it four or five stars and rave above what a genius literary work it is, that would be a lie: to my undereducated and unitiated sensibilities, it was just all right.

Thirteen Ways of Looking

As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.

Thirteen Ways of Looking (a slim volume containing the eponymous novella followed by three short stories) is the first book to be published by Colum McCann since he was violently attacked and left unconscious (after intervening in a domestic dispute between a couple unknown to him) in 2014. As mentioned in his afterword, McCann published his Victim Impact Statement on his website, and in this particular instance, having this personal information about the author completely enriches and enlarges the reading experience. As these stories explore violence and perspective and forgiveness and grace – even when one learns that coincidental circumstances from the first story were written before the attack on McCann – it's fascinating to see how an author works through his own experiences, creating art out of pain. Before I went to the author's website, I thought that these were strong stories with elegant writing; afterwards, they were elevated in my esteem to something even more.

The years don't so much arrive, they gatecrash, they breeze through the door and leave their devastations, all the empty crockery, the broken veins, sunken eyepools, aching gums, but who is he to complain, he's had plenty of years to get used to it, he was hardly a handsome Harry in the first place, and anyway he got the girl, he bowled her over, he won her heart, snagged her, yes, I was born in the middle of my first great love.

To begin, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a novella in thirteen parts, each brief chapter headed by a stanza from the Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (and I have to admit, the meaning of this poem is beyond the likes of me). In this story, we meet 82-year-old Peter Mendelssohn, a retired Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, and he is entirely charming and disarming in his kaleidoscopic memories and self-deprecating humour regarding his failing body. He thinks in rhymes and word-plays, and as his memory pings around the events of his life (and especially his marriage to his dead wife, Eileen), I grew to like him immensely. In alternating sections, we watch police detectives assembling and reviewing all the CCTV footage they can find in which Mendelssohn appears this day, and the reader learns that this is the day that the old man will be murdered. If I'm understanding it properly, this story seems to be a question of where can capital-t-Truth be found: is it in the indisputable proof of video cameras (even if they don't provide the full picture, let alone hint at any human motive, and the detectives need to make leaps of logic to build their case? Is that Truth or trivia?) Is Truth solely to be found inside the human mind (even as it is changed and coloured by the failings of an aging brain? Is that Truth or nostalgia?) Or is Truth a product of art, like poetry: base experience filtered through the human mind to arrive at something higher?

Just like a poem turns its reader into an accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.

In the first of the short stories, What Time is it Now, Where You Are?, an author has been given nearly a year to write a New Year's Eve themed story. He toys with various concepts over the months until he decides it will be about a Marine stationed in Afghanistan, on watch on a ledge above her post, scanning the dark horizon and counting down the minutes until midnight when she can make a satellite call home. This story is all very meta and po-mo – the writer writing about a writer writing – but it is interesting in the details of his process (he knows the Marine is 26 and knows she has a 14-year-old son at home, so he needs to solve the sticky age issue by having the boy be the biological child of her partner) and it totally works in the arc of the bigger picture: if we have already decided that Truth is found in art, this is how art is shaped.

Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water.

In the next story, Sh'khol, we meet a woman living on the barren west coast of Ireland with her deaf, mentally challenged son whom she adopted from a Russian orphanage when he was six. When she wakes to find him missing one morning, and as the search party stretches to days, her mind keeps going back to a story she has been translating recently about a couple who lose both of their children within two years. She keeps returning in her mind to a Hebrew word that was used in the story – “sh'khol”, which means a parent who has lost their child – for which she could find no perfect corollary; the pain captured by the story (magnified by the personal significance of that untranslatable word) perfectly expressing her own tragedy.

In the final story, Treaty, we meet a nun who, after thirty-seven years, is still haunted by violence she experienced as a young woman. When she happens to see the perpetrator on TV – now an apparently upstanding representative in peace negotiations – she becomes obsessed with discovering if he has actually changed; if she would finally be able to forgive him in the proper Catholic sense, “Without hubris, without false charity”. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd think this story is McCann's attempt to directly forge the pain of his own experience into art.

As it happens, when McCann was attacked, he was attending a conference for Narrative4 (a non-profit that seeks to break down barriers among students through story exchange and the promotion of “radical empathy”), and this “radical empathy” seems to be exactly what McCann achieves in these stories: always the reader is transported into the main character's experience (and what is even more remarkable is that in the story about the short story writer, it's the Marine we empathise with, not the author himself). Surely this is the point of art and literature and the pursuit of Truth? Taken on their own, each of these stories is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Seen as pieces of a bigger picture, they approach genius.

And I can only hope that no one minds if I add on the inspirational poem:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Related Poem Content Details

BY WALLACE STEVENS

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,   

The only moving thing   

Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II

I was of three minds,   

Like a tree   

In which there are three blackbirds.   

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   

It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV

A man and a woman   

Are one.   

A man and a woman and a blackbird   

Are one.   

V

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

VI

Icicles filled the long window   

With barbaric glass.   

The shadow of the blackbird   

Crossed it, to and fro.   

The mood   

Traced in the shadow   

An indecipherable cause.   

VII

O thin men of Haddam,   

Why do you imagine golden birds?   

Do you not see how the blackbird   

Walks around the feet   

Of the women about you?   

VIII

I know noble accents   

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   

But I know, too,   

That the blackbird is involved   

In what I know.   

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,   

It marked the edge   

Of one of many circles.   

X

At the sight of blackbirds   

Flying in a green light,   

Even the bawds of euphony   

Would cry out sharply.   

XI

He rode over Connecticut   

In a glass coach.   

Once, a fear pierced him,   

In that he mistook   

The shadow of his equipage   

For blackbirds.   

XII

The river is moving.   

The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.   

It was snowing   

And it was going to snow.   

The blackbird sat   

In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens.

I Let You Go

They reach the quiet street where home lies just around the corner, its seductive warmth a welcome thought. Secure in the environs of her own neighborhood, she lets go of his hand to push away the strands of wet hair from her eyes, laughing at the cascade of droplets it causes.

I Let You Go has been a huge hit – The blockbuster thriller of summer 2016! – and other than the blurbs on the cover that promised me a “killer twist”, I knew nothing at all about this book's premise. I started reading it thinking, “Well, _____ is probably going to happen or ______ will, and that would be dumb”, but when the twist does happen, paving the way for Part Two, I have to admit that I never saw it coming. I liked the twist, it felt earned and not a cheat, but that one element was the best part of the entire book: everything that comes before is slow and schmaltzy, and everything after provokes eye-rolling in its efforts to draw out the drama and add on twists right up to the final scene; all while hosting some of the poorest drawn characters in the most unbelievable of relationships that I've ever read. I understand that the author, Clare Mackintosh, spent twelve years as a police detective (which would certainly qualify her as an expert on the investigative parts of this book), but despite her experience writing for various magazines, that doesn't quite make her a novelist: more than anything, this book felt amateurish and underdeveloped. Thus ends my spoiler-free synopsis; beware beyond (because it's really better to go into this book cold and I'm not trying to spoil anyone's fun; I was able to hide behind spoiler tags on Goodreads, but no such luck here).

I want to fix an image of him in my head, but all I can see when I close my eyes is his body, still and lifeless in my arms. I let him go, and I will never forgive myself for that.

Like I said, I knew nothing about I Let You Go going in, so I was properly shocked by the preface: a rainy day, a slipped hand, a fatal hit-and-run. Then begins the police investigation, and as Mackintosh was a detective, I'm prepared to believe that it would happen just as written: and as the timeline jumps months at a go, it's believable that at first there's all resources of the department focussed on this one case, then a gradual dwindling as other cases come up, and then, a year later, the Chief wanting the case shelved so the public isn't constantly reminded of the unsolved hit-and-run. There's plenty of the procedure and politics of a police force in these sections, and although Ray concedes that this stuff can be dull (as he says, there's a reason why television shows don't include all the boring paperwork and meetings), I'll concede that it's Macintosh's particular area of expertise and understandable for her to include at length. What did bother me in these sections were the unnecessarily messy relationships: the middle-aged Detective Inspector Ray is attracted to his fresh young colleague Kate, while his long-suffering wife Mags – a former cop herself who left the force to become a stay-at-home Mom – resents the long hours her husband spends on the case (as if a former cop and mother wouldn't be the most sympathetic of spouses in this situation) while she's stuck dealing with their teenaged son's increasing delinquency. (One of my early thoughts about the twist was that the son was the driver of the car and that's why it left the scene and why he was increasingly bonkers. I was happy when the twist wasn't that obvious, but when it turns out he's just another juvenile delinquent, and his devoted mother insists on sharing the blame for not preventing it, it felt like dumb drama for its own sake; this has nothing to do with anything. Ray kissing Kate also had nothing to do with anything; just more dumb drama for its own dumb sake.)  It also doesn't look too good for the department when some twists happen near the end of the book that expose some shoddy police work. Would they honestly never have learned Jenna's true last name? Could a case have proceeded against her in court under the wrong name?

You must remember that he was a boy. That he had a mother. And that her heart is breaking.

In an alternating storyline, we meet Jenna: a mother so traumatised from the accident and the loss of her son that she runs away from her life in Bristol, ending up in a remote cottage on the Welsh coast. These sections were very chic-lit, with Jenna rediscovering her self-worth by taking up photography, and when she meets the handsome veterinarian Patrick, she opens herself to love. But then the twist happens and everything changes. And then relationships get more tangled as more characters are added from Jenna's history. And then, as her history is filled in up to the point of the accident itself, the twists are piled up one upon the other until I didn't believe a word of what I was reading. (Jacob was Ian's son and he killed him on purpose so Jenna, who he was about to give the beating of her life, wouldn't find out about him and leave? Uh huh.) And just a word about the shifting point of view: during the investigation, the story is told from a semi-omniscient third person POV, focussing on Ray's inner thoughts; this works fine. In the Jenna sections, POV shifts to her first person perspective; this also works fine, I suppose, because her sections, being chic-litty, are more personal. And then when Ian has his few sections, it's first person from his POV, but he always refers to Jenna in the second person, as “you” (and does that mean it's Ian talking in the title, "I let you go"?). It's not that I was confused by the ever shifting points of view, but it felt so deliberate and inorganic that the device really didn't serve the story well; the effort thoroughly undermines whatever art Mackintosh was striving for.

And that's my main complaint: I Let You Go doesn't rise to the level of art. It's a decent story with a “killer twist” that peters out from there. I didn't believe the actions or motivations of any of the characters (I won't even get into Evie staying away from her sister for five years after making the connections she did; waiting those five years before dropping the bomb about their father, sigh), and every relationship was complicated by factors that didn't relate to the storyline. Every twist after the initial one was increasingly predictable and unbelievable until I was guessing what was going to happen, and then annoyed when I was right. This is the kind of book that I'm happy to have read (so I'm in the know with what everyone is reading), but regretted most every minute I spent with it. My gut says this is a two or two and a half star book, but I'm going to round up to three for that one twist.

Tunesday : Jet Boy Jet Girl

Jet Boy Jet Girl

(Deprijck, F / Lacomblez, Y) Performed by Elton Montello

Can you tell what's on my mind
She's with him it's driving me wild
I'd like to hit him on the head until he's dead
The sight of blood is such a high
Oh
He gives me head

We made it on a Ballroom Blitz
I took his arms and kissed his lips
He looked at me with such a smile my face turned red
We booked a room into the Ritz
Oh
He gives me head
Jet boy jet girl
I'm gonna take you 'round the world
Jet boy I'm gonna make you penetrate
I'm gonna make you be a girl
Oh
Jet boy jet girl

I know I'm only just fifteen
I like to kick I like to scream
And even if I had a kink or two in bed with him
You know it's just a dream
Oh
He gives me head

Jet boy jet girl
I'm gonna take you 'round the world
Jet boy I'm gonna make you penetrate
I'm gonna make you be a girl
Oh
Jet boy jet girl

The other day what a surprise
I saw him with some other guys
God he was dressed up with a girl around his neck
I could have cried with both my eyes
Oh
He gives me head

And if and when I make it though
Or if my brain is stuck on glue
And when the world tries to forget all that I said
You know I'll still remember you
Oh
You gave me head

Jet boy jet girl
I'm gonna take you 'round the world
Jet boy I'm gonna make you penetrate
I'm gonna make you be a girl
Oh
Jet boy jet girl

This is another song that was a favourite of my freaky group of friends, a favourite of mine, in that first year of university. I understand that the lyrics are, perhaps, shocking (and would especially be so to anyone who actually knows me), but I was always only just playing at the fringes of shock. It might say PUNK in big pink letters on that album cover, but this was a very conventional sounding song that was a blast to dance to -- the fact that I was singing along to naughty lyrics in public was all a big game, made hilariously ironic by the poppy melody. So much of what we listened to and danced to was in this pocket of ironic hilarity; for me anyway.

This week, as that heading picture suggests, I want to talk briefly about the movies we watched as a group. Remember: back in the 80s, watching a movie meant going to the video store (which, at the time in Lethbridge, wasn't a big chain store), looking through the limited options, and then selecting from amongst what was unrented: this was no Netflix. If it was up to me, I probably would have chosen one of the campy horror movies that always seemed available and intriguing (Eating Raoul, I Dismember Mama, Basket Case), but as in all things, I demurred to the more sophisticated tastes of my friends.

I remember watching Eraserhead and not getting a thing out of it. I remember watching SubUrbia and Quadrophenia and marvelling at the way my friends raved about how they captured the zeitgeist -- but they didn't for me: I was no disillusioned youth; no rebel. This was always a game for me. I'm sure there were more nihilistic movies that I'm forgetting, but there's one movie I'll always remember, even if I've forgotten its title (durr, I know).

I don't know who selected this for a group movie night, but it was a quasi-pornographic, quasi-documentary about making people's sexual fantasies come true. It started with the setup -- putting an ad in the paper, interviewing applicants -- and then walked step-by-step through to each conclusion. This movie totally foresaw the appeal of reality TV, because that's what was compelling about it: cheap video, low production values, confessionals to the camera, and always always focussed on these people and their real, kind of sad, fantasies.

In one storyline, a man had always fantasised about making love to a female version of himself. He was overweight, with a handlebar moustache, stringy hair, and a Latino accent, but he was sincere and excited to be a part of the project; overjoyed to be selected. When we get to watch his fulfillment scene, this man is dressed in a sexy feathered peignoir and a long, blonde wig in a room full of mirrors. As he ogles himself and runs his hands up and down his body inside the lingerie, the look on the man's face is ecstatic and we all stared open-mouthed: he's happy about this? As it turns out, yes: in the post-fantasy interview, wig askew and brow sweaty, this man was grateful to have been given this opportunity. When asked if he would consider doing this again, I will never forget his final words as he rubbed a meaty hand along his chin: Maybe next time I chave. 

In another storyline, this little weasly looking man with tinted glasses and a porn 'stache explains that his fantasy is to ram his entire fist inside a woman. In his fulfillment scene, he is given a giant can of Crisco and a willing participant. The camera is focussed on the front of the woman, who is on her hands and knees on some kind of a platform, and she is wearing lingerie that totally covers her from our vantage. She keeps smiling into the camera the entire time as we watch the weasel over her shoulder, him getting more and more frustrated as his fist refuses to fit inside her vagina, and although he keeps apologising in the event he's hurting the woman, she just smiles and giggles and shrugs as well as she can while balancing forward on her palms. It was surreal to watch. He eventually gave up and left kind of angry: surely the producers could have found him a woman with a more compliant anatomy?

Jet boy jet girl
I'm gonna take you 'round the world
Jet boy I'm gonna make you penetrate
I'm gonna make you be a girl
Oh oh oh oh
Jet boy jet girl

Now, our gang of friends was guys and girls both, but most of the guys were gay and most of the girls had boyfriends outside the group: for whatever titillating reasons this movie was picked, it wasn't intended to start an orgy; and in the end, it wasn't in the least sexy or graphic. We were all university students and we watched like anthropologists observing an uncontacted culture, and when this movie was done, we talked about it forever ("Maybe next time I chave" became a favourite catch phrase). I don't remember if we ever decided it was more sad or hilarious: should we feel sorry for these sad little men and their sad little dreams or laugh at the absurdity of their low budget fulfillment? We weren't cynical enough, hadn't yet been exposed to the manipulations of reality television, to ask the obvious question: was it the viewing audience who was being set up with this movie instead of the participants? For all I know now, the Latino in the wig and the weasel with the Crisco were simply actors in on the gag, and in a way, I hope that is the case.

So that's what it was like to be on the edge of adulthood in the 80s. Before the internet (with its endless variety of porn and explicit everything), this is what counted as "shocking". In retrospect, it was all pretty tame; and especially for someone like me who was just playing at the edges.

By Gaslight

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