Review of The Dead Secret, Wilkie Collins

A decaying manor-house holds a secret that will ruin its new owners lives. Or not. Only plodding through to the novel's end will reveal the truth. 

Chosen because: I'm a big fan of his other (better) work

It's a bit difficult to review The Dead Secret, just because it is so dull. I'm a big fan of Wilkie Collins, or at least his best known novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White (see my previous review), but The Dead Secret had me yawning and flipping over the pages to reach the inevitable, tedious, ending.

For those of you who haven't come across Collins before, he is a Victorian writer and close friend of Charles Dickens, and one of the founding fathers of the detective story genre. The Moonstone is, in many ways, one of the first and the tricksiest of crime novels - with a twist in the tale long before anyone else had even thought that the genre might become overly predictable.

The Dead Secret is the predecessor to The Woman in White, and the most striking thing about it is how much Collins' writing improves from one novel to the next.

The story is set in a desolate Cornish manor house, and begins with a death-bed and the concealing of a sinister secret. Cut to twenty or so years later, and the secret is uncovered, mainly due to the efforts to conceal it.

The characters spend a great deal of time discussing exactly how they ought to go about finding the secret, which while no doubt realistic, is dull. There's only so much time you can spend reading about two people writing to another person to ask whether he has any ideas about finding out which room in a house is which.

Reviewers at the time criticised Collins' deliberate decision to reveal the secret to the reader at an early point, but I doubt whether concealing from us would have increased the suspense, mainly because it is such a damp squib when it is revealed to the characters. We're told that the secret could destroy a happy marriage, but the characters seem to shrug it off with an 'oh well, these things happen'. We're then told that, even more dramatically, it could lead to the wealthy couple having to curtail their expenditure for a while, and then they don't need to bother. Contrast this with the genuinely villainous plots of The Woman in White, and it's clear that at some point Collins realised that a suspense novel needs... well, a bit more suspense.
  
Having said that, it does have some good set piece moments, which look forward to Collins' later work - particularly the scenes in and around the mysterious 'Myrtle Room' which hides the secret.

Plus the characters are extremely dull. Sarah Leeson, a clear fore-runner to poor Anne Catherick in The Woman in White and Rosanna Spearman in The Moonstone, is tediously rather than intriguingly disturbed. The supposedly charmingly sparky yet tender heroine is, in my opinion at least, irritating (but then so is Rachel in The Moonstone). And the noble blind husband is wet.

Of interest to literary scholars only. Or to people who want to reassure themselves that writing one duff novel does not mean that the next few won't be fantastic.

Review of The Library Paradox by Catherine Shaw (2006)

A Victorian female detective sets out to investigate the impossible murder of a Professor in a locked room. Set at the height of the Dreyfus affair, the novel takes us into the heart of the Jewish community in 19th century London, tackling anti-semitism and xenophobia.

Chosen because: a Christmas present from my mystery-loving aunt

Well, once again (following Colin Cotterrill's The Woman who Wouldn't Die) I'm thrown into the middle of a series, with a set of characters who (presumably) all know each other and each others' little foibles, while I'm left trying to work out who's who, and, more importantly, try to work up the empathy for them.

This last couple of weeks, I've been reading four different crime novels (The Woman who Wouldn't Die, The Cadaver Game, A Lesson in Secrets, and The Library Paradox), all part of a series, all with a historical twist, and its been an incentive to consider the role of character in the readers' enjoyment of the novel. With two of the novels, The Cadaver Game and A Lesson in Secrets, I'd already read several other books in the series. With the other two, I was coming fresh into the story half-way through. How much of my enjoyment of The Cadaver Game was the result of meeting again characters who I'm familiar with? How much of my difficulty with The Library Paradox was the result of being thrown into the fourth or fifth novel in the series?

I was left thinking of Donald Maas's thoughts (in his excellent book Writing the Breakout Novel) on the crucial importance of the reader's empathy with a central character, and his discussions of what makes us identify a character. My problem with Vanessa Weatherburn, the heroine of this novel, was that I never particularly got to like her. For no good reason. She seemed a nice enough person, but there was never that moment in the opening chapter when she grabbed at me and made me think, 'yes, this one, I'm rooting for this one'. I certainly never got as far as liking (or even being able to quite remember who was who) her three young student companions, Amy, Emily and Jonathan, which meant that when one of them fell into mortal danger towards the novel's climax, I was fairly unmoved.

Vanessa Weatherburn meets all the criteria for a heroine I should empathise with - an intelligent, educated Victorian woman, who is willing to throw off the shackles of convention to take up an alternative career as a detective. She even lives in Cambridge, my own home town, in a house which I can picture exactly. And yet... I was left ungripped.

So what does an author have to do to make me want to cheer for their heroes, right or wrong, from the beginning to the end of the novel? What makes us put a small part of our soul into someone else's imagination? It's something that I, as a would-be writer myself, need to keep thinking about. But one of my writing buddies, reading over an early draft of my novel, suggested that it was the small incidents that can touch - and the small words. My heroine left her cold, while her side-kick, she said, had her from the very first moment that he gently smoothed the straps over a dead boy's shoulder.  

I was repeatedly left thinking that I should be enjoying the novel more. For me, without a deeper empathy with the characters, I felt rather as though I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 documentary about attitudes towards Jews in England and France in the late 19th century - and if I'd wanted to read about that, I would have gone back to the source and re-read Amy Levy's Reuben Sachs, or Zola's J'Accuse.

Having said that, I really did enjoy the elements of the novel set deep in the immigrant Jewish community in London's East End. Shaw brought the atmosphere, the sights and smells and people, to life in a way that I was longing for in the rest of the novel's settings. But in many ways, for me, the most memorable part of the whle novel was a re-telling of a short story by Yiddish writer Isaac Peretz. 

Review of Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)

A group of Edwardian explorers follow in the footsteps of Conan-Doyle's The Lost World and find something even more extraordinary than living dinosaurs - a functioning society made up entirely of women. 

Chosen because: on a 'blind date with a book' event, Cambridge City Library.

Preamps the only Edwardian novel which culminates with a woman kneeing her husband in the balls while the reader cheers her on, Herland is a science fiction novel with a difference. Written in 1915 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for her gripping short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper', this novel takes a serio-comic look at contemporary attitudes to women.

Intrigued by rumours of a mysterious kingdom of women, three young Edwardian explorers follow in the footsteps of Conan-Doyle's famous trio, by flying their fragile plane up into an inaccessible mountain valley. Like the well -educated men they are, they know that such a thing is both biologically and socially impossible.When they see well built roads, and well engineered buildings, they know at once that there are some men somewhere in the society. How could women possibly design and build such structures eithout fallings out and cat fights? And yet, of course, this is indeed a Utopia entirely of women.

The novel rapidly turns into a series of discussions between the men, trying to justify the contemporary British and American ways of life, and the women, who repeatedly puncture their pretentions and pull apart their arguments. There are intriguing discussions of the importance of population control (the women choose to give up their ability to have babies in order to balance the population) and the role of education and upbringing (in this soicety, mothers do not necessarily bring up their children). The views of the women, which we might guess are similar to those of Gilman herself, are challenging, and can be read both in the historical context and in terms of Gilmans own troubled life experienced, particularly of motherhood (a short biography of the author is included in the edition that I read).

To be honest, the plot does flag about half way through (there's only so many discussions about how great the world would be with no men and no sex that I could take), with the exception of the excellent kneeing in the balls episode. However, for anyone interested in early 20th century writing, and pnarticulaty in gender roles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this is a must. It's also great to read something other than 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by this talented writer. And if you haven't read 'The Yellow Wallpaper', then go out and read it now.

Special kudos to Cambridge City Library for introducing me to this novel via their 'blind date with a book' event - in which readers were invited to take out a brown paper wrapped book, with only a brief description to guide your choice. The fun was of course in getting it home and unwrapping it. A great chance to pick a book without the normal structures of author, title and cover art.