Ham and Pea Soup: A Rare Interest in Corpses

A Rare Interest in Corpses by Ann Granger

Headline

Pp. 410

Marketed in some territories as The Companion, this is the first novel in what becomes a historical crime series set in Victorian London. After her father’s death in 1864, the penniless Elizabeth (Lizzie) Martin takes up a position as companion to Mrs Parry, her god-father’s wealthy widow, only to find that her predecessor, Madeleine Hexham, who had supposedly run off with an unknown man, is dead (and pregnant). Madeleine’s body is discovered in the recently-demolished slums around the prestigious new railway station at St Pancras, and Inspector Benjamin Ross is in charge of the investigation. Lizzie realises that she knows Ross from her childhood (her father sponsored his education) and that ‘Aunt’ Parry, as she is encouraged to call her, was a landlord for the housing development, causing several elements to build up into a classic detective mystery.

Through the use of alternating chapters between Lizzie and Ross, we are drip-fed information about the developments and social mores of the times, ranging from scientific progress to insights into the working of and attitudes to the police force, and personal relationships.

London is changing and the era is one of rapid development: the capitalist society dictates the rich will get richer while the poor are further oppressed. Mr Fletcher runs the construction company which is building the station on the grounds of the housing Mrs Parry sold to the railway for development. He doesn’t want the police involved on his worksite, because people are fascinated when a body is found. Mrs Parry is equally uncomfortable. “No one wants to be known as a slum landlord and after Madeleine’s body was found there, she liked even less the idea that people would associate her with the place.”

St Pancras Station in the course of building (1871)

Morals and attitudes to women are also questioned. The supposedly religious and upstanding Dr Tibbett expresses his conservative reactionary views to Lizzie in a manner that demonstrates the constraints within which she must work. “I am sorry to say I find increasingly that there is a type of modern young woman who fancies she may speak as freely as a man. I am an old-fashioned fellow who believes that woman is the greatest ornament to her sex when she realises the boundaries Nature has set for her.” He, and others, blame female victims when they are exploited and abused. “We did not know the circumstances of Madeleine’s death. Whatever Tibbett had to say it would amount to declaring that it was all her own fault.”

This is a world in which class distinctions are rife and supremely hierarchical. Inspector Ross comes from mining stock and has risen through the ranks; his superiors dislike him because he is working class. He notes that the social strata extends to the upstairs/ downstairs milieu of the masters and servants. “I reflected that below stairs there existed a world which, in true Darwinian fashion, had evolved quite differently to society above. Had the great naturalist set himself to study it, he might have found as much of interest there as he had in Terra del Fuego.” Although this is the first in the series about Benjamin Ross and Elizabeth Martin, it is evident that there will be more, and that Lizzie and Ben will end up together; they are both honest and self-aware with a strong moral backbone.

The novel is full of the classic features of the Victorian detective drama. The dim-witted Dunn (Ross’s superior officer) struggles to solve the mystery, announcing, “This is turning into a dashed complicated business, regular cat’s-cradle of possible motives.” There is a dressing table with a hidden drawer in which Lizzie conveniently finds a diary written by the dead woman. Thick Victorian fogs made of coal fire smoke and freezing atmospheric conditions add to the ambience and there is even a standard chase through the pea-souper. It is satisfying without being too demanding and a thoroughly enjoyable addition to the genre.

George du Maurier cartoon in Punch, 1889

That Way Madness Lies: The Warlow Experiment

The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan

Serpent's Tail

Pp. 276

This novel is based on the true story of an eccentric Victorian gentleman, Herbert Powyss, who conducted an experiment; he placed an advert in a newspaper asking for a man to volunteer to be placed in isolation in his cellar for seven years with ‘every convenience desired’ but ‘without seeing a human face’. John Warlow was the only person who answered the advert, ‘a semi-literate labourer with a wife and six children to provide for’. Alix Nathan imagines how this experiment might have worked, or not, and she has created a rich novel of mental manipulation. She imagines that Powyss wants to see how a mind would cope without social contact and write up his findings to present to the Royal Society.

Powyss is typical of his era in that he likes to collect and catalogue things. He imagines that a human would be no different to his plants, “where so often he’d exerted order and precision, used good sense and experience, where reason had ruled”. Many of the metaphors are flora-related; he also hangs paintings on his walls of the Dutch masters and the cover of the book is a Flemish Vanitas image with fruit and flowers surrounded by insect life. Even the endpapers are glorious depictions of wildlife on wallpaper, representing both the care with which Powyss took to furnish Warlow’s underground apartments, and the never-ceasing ecological effects of co-existence.

Everyone in the house is affected by the presence of the man in the cellar, including the cook and the butler. The novel frequently switches perspective mid-chapter from Powyss to Fox, his old schoolfellow, or Hannah, Warlow’s wife, to Catherine, the housemaid. As one expects, madness ensues, and there are clear echoes of Frankenstein, Pygmalion, and even Jekyll and Hyde. Science without nature is abhorrent and potentially impossible. Life is fragile and unpredictable. Alix Nathan’s book is a superb rationale for the Ethical Conduct of Human Research Committee.

Creation

There was a time when no one believed in the Theory of Evolution. Then there was Darwin and On the Origin of Species and everyone did. Now some people refute evidence that the world wasn’t created in seven days. According to Creation, 150 years ago a nine-year-old child was made to kneel in rock salt for defending the existence of dinosaurs. She was Annie, the favourite, and short-lived, child of Charles Darwin.

Creation tells the story of a man’s personal and familial battle – to confirm what he has proven; he must turn his back on all his wife believes. Paul Bettany embodies Darwin’s inner struggle beautifully with nuances of insanity as he wrestles with the big issues. Science is at war with religion and, as the obnoxiously vituperative Huxley (a splendid Toby Jones) tells him, “You have killed God”.

He does not slash through the framework of society glibly and in fact prevaricates for a couple of decades before finishing his earth-shattering work. He knows that, “Society is bound together with religious beliefs – it’s an improbable form of barque, but it floats.” As he fidgets through grace before meals and leaves a church in a middle of a sermon by his friend Reverend Innes (a firm but gentle Jeremy Northam), we see the gradual eroding of his religion in a tale told through flashbacks and fast forwards. “The loss of faith is a slow process like the raising of continents over thousands of years.”

He questions the rational of a vindictive divinity. Thousands die that only a few may live – what sort of a plan is that? Innes can only answer, “It is not my duty to speculate on the will of God.” Just as there are no atheists in the trenches, Darwin postpones publishing because, although he has proved the triumph of science, he is still afraid to risk his mortal soul. When his daughter’s life hangs in the balance (it is to be supposed that she died from scarlet fever), he is prepared to bargain with God; if you let my child live...

This all sounds rather weighty and cerebral, yet Bettany’s Darwin is warm and vivacious. Whether playing with Jenny the orang-utan, explaining to his daughter in explicit detail how light can make a picture as she fusses in the photographer’s studio, or waiting nervously for his religious wife to finish reading his book and pronounce her verdict, he is eminently human albeit not particularly Victorian.

If there is a heaven and hell, he may be separated from his wife for eternity. And he loves his wife as he loves his children. Jennifer Connelly plays Emma Darwin with unassuming grace and strength. Their chemistry is clear through looks and gestures that belie the oft-portrayed repressed emotions of the era. She says of her husband, “He’s like a barnacle and if you prise him from his rock you’ll kill him.” It appears that she is this rock.

It transpires that Darwin and his wife are first cousins and both of them feel guilt over their daughter, Annie’s death. He worries that they never should have married and that their blood is too close. He thought they were breeding the perfect child but now fears that they endowed her with the weakness that killed her. Amid the current debate about designer babies, it is opportune of him to muse, “Nature selects for survival; humans for appearance.”

There is rather an obvious scene in a pub where two pigeon fanciers explain to him that they are breeding their birds to enhance their attributes, although there are inevitable casualties en route. Is he guilty of treating living things as experiments – even his children? In one of his hallucinations, the dead embryos captured in specimen-jars come horrifically alive in his study. In a fit of fevered rage he releases all the doves from their cote, disgusted by his genetic engineering. His imagination becomes increasingly obsessed with Annie (Martha West) who continues to dominate his thoughts after her death.

Great cinematography abounds from the opening credits (cells; sperm; fish; birds; butterflies; wildebeest) to the sped-up cycle of life and the seasonal changes depicting passage of time. The English countryside is stunning with its woodland mammals and rock pool inhabitants. Nature is instructive and it is also a battlefield. In a scene straight out of a BBC documentary, a fox catches a rabbit much to the dismay of the youngest Darwin girl. The moral is left to Annie to explain, “The fox has to eat the rabbit or its babies will die – that’s the balance of things.”

And above all, this is a story. Darwin regales his children with tales of adventure – how many kids can rely on their father’s personal exploits of climbing the Andes, being on a ship struck by St Elmo’s fire, earthquakes and giant sloths? The backdrop is an achingly beautiful string quartet or the passionate piano playing of Emma. The beautiful descriptions come from a voice over of diaries and letters weaving a rich tapestry of light and dark threads.

Nothing is black and white. Can you maintain a belief in an abstract theory when it threatens you personally? How far can you have a difference of opinion and still be friends? How much should you leave to your children and what do you owe them? The film contends that we are in a constant state of flux – we have been and are being evolved – and that this is not the end. The future (stem-cell research; cloning; religious fundamentalism and the latest God delusion) is as yet unwritten.

It is fitting that the film is based on the book, Annie’s Box by Randal Keynes, a great-great-grandson of Darwin himself. As Charles and Emma separate and reunite, their harmony and entropy echoes the opening credits. Side-by-side and hand-and-hand they appear two-by-two in a manner that will satisfy followers of Genesis and genetics alike.