Set in London in the sultry summer of 1891, the latest novel from the much-touted historical author Robert Edric offers many opportunities for colourful sensationalism. Its narrator, Webster, is a photographer working for Sir Henry Irving and his manager, Bram Stoker, at the Lyceum theatre. As a lucrative sideline, he supplies props and costumes to a sinister, manipulative pornographer, Marlow (the “London Satyr” of the book’s title). When a sex scandal convulses the capital — a minor aristocrat is accused of murdering a child prostitute — Webster’s links with the underworld are at risk of exposure.
To make matters worse, his wife becomes a medium: encouraged by their predatory daughter, she starts holding seances in the house, not only exploiting other people’s gullibility but fooling herself that she’s in contact with a younger daughter of theirs who died. No wonder Webster feels anxious.
The London theatre world, domestic seances, erotic photography and lethal perversions — the novel appears to have all the ingredients for a late-Victorian melodrama. Curiously, though, its effects are muted. Edric, known for the exotic variety of his fiction (his locations have ranged from the Arctic to the Congo), is prized too for his understated subtlety. Here, the understatement is taken so far as virtually to eliminate assertion. With Irving, for instance, we learn little more than that he is an egotistical thespian who laps up public adoration. With Stoker, the book avoids any hint that he is the future author of Dracula. Even the pornographic shoots are described in a cool, distant style overlaid by edgy conversation.
In fact it is conversation, of a particularly tense kind, that provides the book’s chief excitement. In its opening sentence Webster takes “a circuitous route” to Marlow’s studio. Likewise circuitous are his verbal exchanges with Marlow, Stoker, his wife and the police. Surrounded by “silently turning currents and eddies of contrivance, deception and betrayal”, he conducts conversation like guerrilla warfare, listening for whispers and suggestions, inspecting phrases for traps and dangers, watchful for detours and blocking moves. Gradually, as every conversation becomes an exercise in wary subterfuge, you realise that this is not a melodrama but a psychological study of anxiety — the anxiety that comes from performing a role for which one is not truly suited.
Hedged around with seedy compromises, Webster is forced to dodge and lie, yet he is also a man of authentic feeling. His grief for his lost child is deep and genuine. Though a liar, he is not a self-deluder; in fact his acute awareness of acting allows him to perceive its pervasiveness. Through Webster’s perceptions, the book links the theatre with both spiritualism and pornography. Despite their contrasting casts of spooks and strippers, the seance and the floor show are both forms of drama: exploiting basic human desires, they each use performance to ignite imagination and offer satisfaction and relief. Bringing together ghosts and fleshpots, ectoplasm and orgasm, might seem far-fetched — yet Edric succeeds in coupling them not only metaphorically but, as the plot develops, in terms of Victorian erotica.
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As ever, Edric has done his research, though purists might balk at some of the novel’s language. In a book set in 1891, it could seem perversely anachronistic to employ terms (“photogenic”, “empathise”) that only became current much later. Likewise, though Webster confidently states that “the legal age of consent was still 13; it hadn’t been 12 for at least 15 years”, you’d expect him to know that it was raised to 16 in 1885 following the furore cause by WT Stead’s notorious pamphlet The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon, which is referred to in the text. Despite the blurb’s claim that Edric’s novel is “a brilliant summoning” of Victorian England, its real strength is not so much social accuracy as psychological acuity.