The Poisoned Island (2013) by Lloyd Shepherd

Buoyed by my enjoyment of The Age of Wonder, I spent Christmas in the grip of a fixation with the Georgian period. As I’ve said before, it’s not a period I’ve been traditionally particularly interested in. It’s the Victorian age that still rules my heart, don’t worry about that. But while the Georgians might have lacked fashion sense and pseudo-modern technology, they sure knew how to conquer other countries; and as such, they built the model of Empire that the whole world was soon to tremble to during the Victorian age.
Their Empire-building may have been ramshackle and occasionally haphazard compared to what came after, but they set the scene for it. So to that extent, I’ve taken an interest in them. I spotted the just-released Poisoned Island at a WHSmith’s at Gatwick airport on the way home for Christmas and thought that it looked an appropriate read considering my new area of interest.

The Poisoned Island is a novel that takes the idea of Empire as one of its central themes. It’s essentially a detective novel set in London in 1812, as a ship called the Solanderpulls into the docks of the East End. The book is a sequel; the second featuring the proto-detective Charles Horton of the River Police as its hero. It being so early in the development of modern policing, Horton is rather ahead of his time in his insistence on such niceties as motives and evidence. When sailors from the Solander start dropping dead about East London, Horton sets to finding the killer using his box of new detecting tricks. Before you can say The Madness of King George, Horton is traipsing around Wapping, Rotherhide, and other places in the east of London that I pass through quite frequently on the DLR.

The book touches on quite a few themes that I found interesting. It was enlightening, for example, to meet Sir Joseph Banks again, so soon after his appearance as the hero of an early chapter in The Age of Wonder, and see him shown in a different and less flattering light. In that tome, Banks had been a young, open-minded adventurer with an interest in everything, and who made the most of his trip to the paradise of Tahiti. He absorbed the Tahitian culture and made the most of the willing women of the island. In The Poisoned Island, Banks has become the elder statesman of British science, large of girth and conservative in his philosophy. His south-sea adventuring as a young man is here treated with quite a good deal of cynicism; the possibility of rape, both literal and figurative, is toyed with continuously. And just as the destruction of the Tahitian way of life by the Europeans has resulted in something poisonous coming back to haunt London, Banks’ past amorous doings too come back to demand payment.

I enjoyed Banks as a character in this book; I liked his relationship with his head gardener and fellow scientist/explorer Brown too. Any time the book took a turn into their world of early 19^th-century botany, I perked up quite a bit. But then, this is a world I am currently exploring myself for the first time, and all the characters and discoveries they reference seem like new friends to me. Fish in a barrel, I guess. I am located squarely in the target audience for this stuff, no doubt about it.

As for the detecting stuff, well, it’s still not for me. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t care for crime fiction, not even Sherlock Holmes, despite Conan Doyle being one of my favourite authors. And whenever the book lapses into whodunit territory, I lose interest. In fairness, there aren’t many ‘crime-only’ sections. Almost none of the book is devoid of historical interest, what with this version of Georgian London being overrun by corrupt adventurers, famous scientists and half-breed aboriginals. There’s always something interesting happening. It’s just that the central plot – a mystery about someone killing other people – failed to grab me, as is usually the case with crime fiction, and as a result the book occasionally felt like a bit of a chore to me. I guess for me, this book is a bitter pill thoroughly coated in very enticing sweet stuff.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

I first encountered Jack the Ripper one of those big ol' potboiler book of unexplained mysteries that every kid should have. It had an introduction by Colin Wilson and an article on Nostradamus that scared seven shades of hell out of me by claiming that the world was going to end-

In 1999 and seven months

From the sky shall come the great king of terror

Brr. Those words haunt me still. Thankfully, old Michel's prophecy was off (by at least two years anyway!) and I'm still around, sharing reminisces about childhood trauma. Anyway, the book also featured a terrific article on Jack the Ripper. Ok, the writing was poor, but all the elements were in there- spooky, fog-shrouded Victorian London (which I already knew about because of Dracula and H. G Wells), a mysterious killer who was left-handed and had expert SURGICAL KNOWLEDGE, and sent taunting letters and half-eaten kidneys to the police. What a character!

I think the fact that the Ripper was literate and consciously stoked his fame (vis-a-vis the letters, though I didn't find out till years later that he probably didn't write any of them) made him more interesting to me than boring, sordid, ordinary crime stories (still hate 'em, actually); it made him a character. More Springheel Jack than Jack Jones. And add to this that he was probably a doctor, and an upper-class one at that: I pictured Jack as a flamboyant, skilled and charming madman who wanted to give the world something that would shock and awe them- something the world would never, ever forget.

I still feel that some of this is valid. Look, if you've already decided to be crazy and commit some terrible and motiveless crime (and obviously the best option is not to do that at all), than at least you could do it in a way that's creative and memorable, instead of just seedy and depressing. It's a fact that people are obsessed with war and murder. A guy once cut up five prostitutes, and one hundred years later we're still talking about it. We're fascinated by it. We use it as a window into his time and place, we use it as a jumping-off point to learn about the society he came from. Look at Hitler, to invoke Godwin's law. However terrible he was (in fact, because of how terrible he was), he will always be a million times more fascinating than the good people who struggled against him. We may admire them, but we don't buy books about them and we don't make movies about them.

How many books or movies have you seen about Detective Abberline?

Have you even heard of him?

Ok, I'm going to step down from the soapbox now. The other feature of note about the Unexplained Mysteries book that needs mentioning is the imagery that it used- all taken

from Punch and the Illustrated Police News. The former was a Victorian magazine that is still famous for its satirical cartoons such as dropping the pilot and the Rhodes Colossus. The latter is probably best looked upon as an ancestor of Britain's loathsome tabloid culture. Both featured great line-drawing art that solidified Victorian London in my mind as a dark, sordid place full of horror and mystery.

Around every monochrome corner in this imaginary London, it seemed that serious-faced men in mutton chops found the shattered corpses of fallen women. Elsewhere, mesmerists, mediums and even a few hapless bobbies did their best to track down those responsible. See for yourself:

Little did I know it, but out there waiting for me was From Hell: not only is it probably the most detailed fictionalization of the Whitechapel murders in any medium, but it's also one of the most immersive trips into Victorian London it's possible to take nowadays. This is due in no small part to the art of Eddie Campbell, who clearly based his vision of this period on the kind of lurid art featured above. Alan Moore's extensive research and all-round geniusness don't hurt either. Calling From Hell a comic book is a bit like calling the Sistine Chapel a wallpaper replacement. It's a many-layered piece that manages to comment on much more than just the Ripper murders.

But first thing's first: a little bit of plot. The story kicks off when heir to the British throne Pronce Albert has an affair with a Catholic sweet-shop girl that results in a pregnancy. This alerts us that Moore is using as his base the outlandish theories of one Stephen Knight, writer of Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution. It's an ingeniously complex conspiracy theory that even Moore admits is nonsense. Long story short, in order to avert scandal Queen Victoria herself orders that a small group of prostitutes who have attempted to blackmail certain parties with this information. Unlike much Jack the Ripper fiction (including the movie version), From Hell is decidedly not a whodunnit, as we learn early on who the killer is: Sir William Whitey Gull, physician-in-ordinary to the Queen (it's not a secret, he's on the front of the book for feck's sake).

Soon, Detective Fred Abberline in brought in to deal with the case. He's not happy- after years working in Whitechapel, he thought he'd finally left it behind after being promoted. Now he's back amid the poverty and prostitutes of London's East End. But it seems as if many on in the police force don't particularly want him to track down the killer...

From Hell is a huge book, and using the Ripper murders as a focus, it manages to comment on a great many subjects. Moore gives us one a feeling of what it must have been like 'on the ground' in Victorian London, and many aspects of that society are addressed: the social system, racism, political activism, art and history. A multitude of historical cameos occur- including from Irishmen W. B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. And if you've ever heard the story about the cursed mummy case in the British Museum, well, there's a little something for you, too.

There's a lot of talk about the occult, too. The narrative kind of stops dead in chapter four as Sir William Gull gives his uncomprehending coachman an occult tour of London. It goes on a bit long, and contains perhaps just a bit too much information for the casual reader (restraint was never one of Moore's strengths), but to those who are interested, it's a masterful piece of work. Using entirely real places and working from photographs, Moore and Campbell provide a wealth of history, both real and imagined, about the various pagan activities that have existed around the British capitol. Even the more outlandish theories have some basis in history, as Moore proves in his wonderful appendix.

Moore seems to have it in for the Masons. Like in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they live up to their legendary status as secret string-pullers in From Hell. Here, Moore provides a fascinatingly thorough look at how such an organization might actually function. Again, he claims that most of the information has been claimed as fact at some time or another, though he was not afraid to bend the facts to fit his story. The Masons are portrayed as an important group to get involved with if one wishes to advance themselves in Victorian London.

All this fanciful stuff aside, From Hell remains an excellent way to begin learning the facts of the true case. The appendix makes clear what is fact and what is fiction, and Moore has attempted to cleave as close to fact as he can (within the boundaries of Knight's outrageous plot). Having faces and characters to attack to the various persons involved with the case is helpful too, and spurs one on to read about the truth (Charles Warren, for example, was a far more interesting character in real life than the book hints at).

There's a whole lot of other great stuff chucked in as well. As Gull descends deeper and deeper into madness during the book, he has hallucinations that link his murders to others committed at different times throughout history. At first it seems like just an oddity, but Moore is working towards some tremendous ideas about the nature of history, paranormal experiences, and murder. Stick with it. And the final appendix is a self-contained comic quite unlike anything you'll ever read. It's a brilliant take-down on the notion that we'll ever really know what happened in Whitechapel in 1888. All the major suspects and theories are looked at in some detail, but the take-home message is that the mentality of those fascinated by the murders is as interesting as the original happenings.

The Ripper murders will obviously continue to fuel books and movies. But I can't see any of them improving on what Moore and Campbell have done.

And to mix and mash influences, I'd like to note that the reason I can still name all five of the 'canonical' victims is not any book, but in fact this.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

For all that I bang on about Arthur Conan Doyle, I've gotta 'fess up to the fact that I'm not overly enamoured by his most famous fictional son. Mostly, I guess, because I simply have no interest in crime fiction, of which Sherlock Holmes was probably the most perfect kind. The mystery of a whodunnit always seemed rather paltry to me after an early diet of Clarke, Asimov, and of course, a cornucopia of mind-expanding 19th-century horrors. So what if one mammal kills another- boring. And you expect me to care about who did it? Bring on the Martian tripods, the undead half-breeds and the space-travel, please. I do have a passing familliarity with the Holmesian cannon, more out of a feeling of duty to my favourite author than because I've really enjoyed it. Well, I did enjoy The Hound of the Baskervilles, but it felt to me as though Doyle was somehow repressing his own natural urge to bring a wacky supernatural element to the story, just because, in the world of Holmes (though not, apparently, in the real-life world of Doyle), there has to be a more prosaic explanation.

In any case, I've finally gotten around to a viewing of Hollywood's latest tinkering with a classic, and wouldn't you know, I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting- perhaps because I'm not too tied to the original source material. Basically, Guy Ritchie's sort-of made another one of his cheeky-chappie Cockney gangster flicks, except it's happening in the 19th century. Well, there's more to it than that, but still. Robert Downey Jr. and J*** L** play Holmes and Watson respectively. Predictably for a Hollywood adaptation, the movie ups the action and dumbs down some of the original material. But is it any good?

Overall, it's a gorgeous-looking romp that's good fun. Honestly, whatever sins Ritchie has committed by making Holmes into a two-fisted, pit-fighting dandy are more than made up for by the sheer liveliness and speed of the story. The relationship between the two leads has been slightly altered- they are now fast-talking buddy-movie leads, but the dialogue is pithy and hilarious throughout, and there are just enough elements from the stories left in, or slightly misused, to make you believe, at least for 100 minutes, that this is a legitimate interpretation of Doyle's character. Holmes is a flamboyant, over-intelligent misfit who doesn't live in or interact very well with the rest of society. Watson is a lady-killer who loses his patience with Holmes's eccentricities at times. And the two of them do have a brotherly affinity for each other in a kind of hetero life-mate kind of way (if not outright bro-ners) that is threatened when Watson gets married. So maybe Ritchie is stretching this stuff, but it's all there in the books.

Another thing Ritchie has done is to remind me why I'm fascinated by Victorian London. He makes it seem so fun (which it obviously was, if you lived in the right part of town). He even drags in an occult conspiracy that rips elements wholesale out of From Hell, whether he knows it or not. It's quite possible that he just reckons you can't tell a gothic London tale without this stuff, but the parallels are striking-

-a Masonic-type society that controls the empire
- secrets of the ancients
-a plan involving the occult architecture of London, including a scene with a giant map

What do you think?

The Wolfman

Pity the poor lycanthrope. With no distinguished source material to draw upon, and no big-name author to place before the title, it seems the wolfman is barely holding onto his position among the monstrous big-hitters. Dracula and Frankenstein must shun him at parties. Hollywood has had to base their recent wolfman effort on the 1941 original, and though the charmingly low-tech practical-effects wolfman is present and correct, it isn't the 1940's feel that causes the viewer to howl.


Instead, it feels as though the filmmakers have taken a cheesy 70's Hammer script- a relic of a simpler time when certain tropes were not quite as hackneyed as they are today- and filmed it in 2009, with a decent budget and played absolutely straight. It's the only explanation for the way the film plays every single Victorian horror cliche without irony and without any attempt to present them in any new way.

Decaying Gothic mansion? Check. Fair enough. Fog-shrouded moors? Check. That's allright, too. But in the same movie as mystic gypsies, torch-wielding superstitious villagers and cruel Victorian asylum 'scientists'?

Damn, I'm making this sound like the greatest movie ever. Any film containing such a cornucopia of treats should be a winner. But believe me- whatever you have in your head right now is almost certainly a thousand times more entertaining than the Wolfman actually is. There's something about how these elements are presented- I feel they would only work if the audience had absolutely never seen a horror movie (or a Saturday morning cartoon, which is where most of these elements now belong) before. Maybe if this movie had been made in 1941, or in 1971, it would have been a masterpiece, its strong visual style setting trends for decades to come. But The Wolfman instead trots out time-worn plotlines and expects us to be affected by them.

Ditto for the dialogue- maybe I'm just close-minded, but I feel as though the day has passed when you can put such downright corny words into a script and still play it straight. When Anthony Hopkins first appears (wearing a hideous tiger-skin jacket that in no way telegraphs the later 'revelation' of his bestial nature) to greet his recently returned son, I literally begged him not to quote 'the Prodigal son returns'. Just as he said it. The film is full of moments where you think 'ah, now if this were a cheesy movie made before 1979, they would say X here'- and The Wolfman never disappoints. As soon as Emily Blunt is shown researching werewolf lore in a dusty library, we know that we're gonna be confronted with this:

































Yeah, so there hasn't been a werewolf movie made yet that doesn't feature this woodcut: So far, I've noted it in The Wolfman, The Howling, and the X-Files episode 'Shapes'. But usually the pain is eased somewhat by having it introduced by Dick Miller (everything is better with Dick Miller).

The key to where it all goes really wrong lies in the asylum scene. Del Toro, who knows by now what he has become, is being studied by a demented 'doctor'. He's one of those Victorian sadist scientists who thinks that the best way to cure dementia is to cut out the patients' brain, or dunk them in freezing water. This particular trope has been used in From Hell and other movies to great effect, but here, the scientist is a ridiculous cartoon character who understates the horror we should be feeling. He straps Del Toro into a chair before an audience of doctors and students, in order to prove that no transformation will take place when the moon turns full. Of course, Del Toro knows all too well what will happen, and his desperate pleading is taken as being no more than proof of his dementia. It ought to have been a tense, physchological scene with the scientists waiting to be proven right, and Del Toro (and the audience) waiting for the carnage they know is about to occur. Instead, everything happens in a rushed manner reminiscint of a music video. Del Toro is strapped in, he warns the scientists, the moon appears immediately, he wolfs out within seconds. The resulting violence (and it is a great scene) feels light and pointless because of the botched foreplay.

The Wolfman does look great- dark and brooding- but ultimately, this is another slick trick to distract the audience from the fact that there is no substance. The edits are cut so tight that the film seems afraid to linger on anything for more than a moment, as if aware of how hollow the plot is. And apart from some howlers (the dodgy-looking were-Gollum should never have got past the script stage), the use of CG is mostly used to augment the wolfman as he leaps about, while he is portrayed for the most part using practical effects. And if I haven't mentioned any characterisation yet, well, that's because there isn't any.