THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2010 BOOK WORLD
The Victorian mystery gets a horrific twist — in more ways than one
by Michael Dirda
Christmas, the evenings length- en, the grass and the garden set- tle down for a long winter’s nap, and the cool temperatures in- vite country walks and neigh- borhood strolls, followed by warming drinks. It’s flannel- shirt and wool-blanket weather, the time for ghost stories, lei- surely historical novels and swashbuckling tales of adven- turous derring-do. “The Strange Affair of Spring
L
Heeled Jack” neatly blends all three of those autumn book re- quirements. Set in 1861 London, it takes for its heroes Sir Rich- ard Francis Burton — the formi- dable 19th-century explorer, lin- guist and scholar — and the young Algernon Charles Swin- burne, the diminutive Pre-Ra- phaelite poet (and masochist). With a special com- mission as king’s agents from his maj- esty King Albert, the two friends soon emerge as the era’s dy- namic crime-fighting duo, yet another ver- sion of Holmes and Watson, Batman and Robin, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. King Albert? What-
ever happened to Queen Victoria? Alas, that young monarch was assassinated by a mysterious gunman in 1840. As a conse- quence, the 19th cen- tury and the British Empire are no longer quite as we remember them from high school history books. In fact, we’ve entered the fab- ulous and always entertaining realm of classic steampunk. Just as much of today’s horror
ate October initiates the great reading season of the year. From now until
that there is some connection between Speke’s abductors and the rumors about strangely predatory criminals, dressed in scarlet cloaks and hoods, who have been slashing throats and kidnapping young boys in the East End. When the artist Gus- tave Doré — making drawings of London’s underclass — glimpses one, he sketches what appears to be a “loup-garou,” a werewolf. Even more unsettling, how-
THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEELED JACK By Mark Hodder Pyr. 373 pp. Paperback, $16
ever, is the sudden reappear- ance of Spring Heeled Jack. Long held to be an urban myth, he is very real to the teenage girls whose clothes he tears away. Burton first glimpses him late at night, in an alley filled with a billowing white vapor: “The steam parted and from it sprang a bizarre apparition: a massively long-legged shape — like a carnival stilt-walker — a long, dark cloak flapping from its hunched shoulders, bolts of lightning crackling around its body and head. . . . Was it human, this thing? Its head was large, black, and shiny, with an aura of blue flame crawling around it. Red eyes peered at him mali- ciously. White teeth shone in a lipless grin.” The creature ad- dresses Burton and tells him “to stay out of it” and “stop orga- nising forces against me! It’s not what you’re meant to be do- ing! Your destiny lies elsewhere. Do you un- derstand?” In
fact, Burton doesn’t have
the least inkling of what the creature is talking about. But most readers will already begin to guess that Spring Heeled Jack is... Well, I shouldn’t say, should
fiction is vampire-driven, one major branch of modern fan- tasy — in novels, “cosplay” (cos- tume play), gaming and comics — is obsessed with an alternate 19th century, one in which the inventions and mad scientists of Jules Verne, the tweedy sci- ence fiction of H.G. Wells and the gaslight romances of Arthur Conan Doyle have been mixed and remixed. In steampunk fic- tion, a count from Transylvania might win the hand of Queen Victoria (see Kim Newman’s “Anno Dracula”); Charles Bab- bage and Ada Lovelace actually do invent the computer (see William Gibson and Bruce Ster- ling’s “The Difference Engine”); and heroes like Allan Quater- main and Captain Nemo com- bat Martian invaders (see Alan Moore’s “The League of Extraor- dinary Gentlemen,” Vol. 2). If you remember it, the cult sci- ence fictional television series “The Wild Wild West” clearly possessed a proto-steampunk feel. So does the alternate Eng- land of Philip Pullman’s young- adult series “The Golden Com- pass” and its sequels. By stretching a bit, one can even add the recent vogue for mash- ups, in which classic fiction is reimagined with a horrifying twist: “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” or “Android Kareni- na.” In “The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack,” gentlemen still wear top hats, carry sticks and visit their clubs; young la- dies are expected to observe the Victorian proprieties; Lime- house is dirty and dangerous; and the London fog rolls in thicker than ever. But there are also flying rotorchairs, specially bred dogs who deliver the mail, mechanical litter-crabs to de- vour the street’s refuse. Chim- ney sweeps ply their trade, but they belong to a strange guild headed by an unseen figure named the Beetle. Because of his facial treatments and life- extension surgery, the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, re- sembles a wax dummy from Ma- dame Tussaud’s. A young Irish newsboy, with a gift for quips and repartee, is named Oscar Wilde. As the book opens, Richard
Burton learns that his fellow ex- plorer, former friend and cur- rent enemy John Hanning Speke, has apparently attempt- ed suicide. Having blown off half his head and been rushed to a hospital, Speke isn’t expec- ted to live — but that night he is mysteriously spirited away. By whom? The hospital staff has been mesmerized and told to forget everything they have seen. But Burton soon realizes
I?
As the action proceeds, Bur- ton roams London in disguise — as an old seaman or a Sikh — and the dapper Swinburne goes undercover among the chimney sweeps, and the strange hap- penings increase. Could Spring Heeled Jack have some connec- tion with the Libertine move- ment founded by Henry de la Poer Beresford, a.k.a. the Mad Marquess, or with the Technolo- gists, a scientific league formed by the engineer Isambard King- dom Brunel, the eugenicist Francis Galton, the medical genius Florence Nightingale and the great scientist Charles Darwin? Mark Hodder’s “The Strange Case of Spring Heeled Jack” is apparently the first of a series of adventures involving Burton and Swinburne. As fantasy, the novel doesn’t really break new ground, given that the plot com- bines elements from notable works by Robert A. Heinlein, H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, among others. But if you’re looking for a cold night’s enter- tainment, this high-spirited mix of fact and fancy will do quite nicely, quite nicely indeed.
bookworld@washpost.com
Dirda will be away for six weeks. His Thursday reviews in Style will resume Dec. 9.
LookWho’sComing to the
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SUSAN BIDDLE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST GRANDIOSE:Valery Gergiev conducts the Mariinsky Orchestra and three choruses in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at the Kennedy Center. Mahler’s 8th, a circus of wonder music reviewfrom C1
ing symphonies at Carnegie Hall (six in five concerts), a 41
⁄2 -hour
opera at the Metropolitan Opera (“Boris Godunov”) and hopping down to the Kennedy Center for one of the biggest pieces in the repertory is right up his alley. On Tuesday night at the Ken- nedy Center, he offered Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the “Sympho- ny of a Thousand,” and one felt he might really have been happier if there actually were a thousand people before him onstage, rather than — according to the Washing- ton Performing Arts Society’s president, Neale Perl — a mere 300 or so. On Wednesday, he was scheduled to return to Carnegie Hall for Mahler’s Second Sym- phony, or “Resurrection,” another behemoth, followed by another Eighth on Thursday. On Monday, he conducted “Boris Godunov.” In short: just the kind of week Ger- giev likes. All that helps fuel a kind of sur-
face excitement that’s Gergiev’s stock in trade. There’s so much going on, so much loudness and brightness and sparkle, that it can be positively beguiling. After all, we want music to be exciting, to reach us viscerally, to move away from the ivory tower and the realm of the cerebral. Gergiev does this in spades. The massed forces onstage
Tuesday — including a chorus from Spain, the Orfeón Pamplo-
nés; two choruses from Washing- ton, the Choral Arts Society (fea- tured on his recent recording of the piece) and the Children’s Cho- rus of Washington; eight vocal so- loists; and the Mariinsky Orches- tra — echoed the aesthetic of a
idea (and the period; the sympho- ny was premiered in 1910). The whole thing is so big and overblown, it hovers just on the good edge of parody. If these are wall murals, Ger- giev knows the contours of the
There’s so much going on, so much loudness and brightness and sparkle, that it can be positively beguiling.
May Day parade, all in black and white and red, the children, like Young Pioneers, raising their hands to their faces when they sang as if giving out battle calls. (They sang robustly, and very well.) It’s a bit of a circus; and maybe
that made it a good echo of the charms of Mahler’s Eighth, the most elusive and in many ways biggest and brashest of his sym- phonies. The Eighth juxtaposes a Latin hymn text with the last sec- tion of Goethe’s “Faust,” and yet it flows more directly than some of Mahler’s other purely instrumen- tal works. It might switch from a tenor aria to an orchestral in- terlude, but less often from a fu- neral march to a folk dance. Think of wall murals by Gustav Klimt — golden and shimmering and epic — and you’ll have the
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room. He can sweep in and find a telling moment (the Spanish cho- rus’s pointillistic entrance, the words like little crisp mosaic tiles of sound; the round warmth of the horns, like oil, antiphonally echoing a melodic phrase from Avgust Amonov, the rather
ragged-sounding tenor). His or- chestra plays with color and per- sonality — husky strings, golden brass — though in places it sounded tarnished. And some of the soloists — notably the bari- tone Alexei Markov and the clear, luminous soprano Anastasia Ka- lagina — were excellent. But the down side of Gergiev’s
hasty approach is a seat-of-the- pants quality that yields, at times, pure sloppiness, as if sound were crashing and careening off the walls. This half-improvisatory air might be a source of some of the performance’s excitement. But it would be nice to hear what the or- chestra could do if, rather than pulling a performance out of a hat, it actually gave two or three days of careful rehearsal to a sin- gle concert. On Gergiev’s calen- dar, though, that’s just not pos- sible.
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