I've asked for this to be put in the library - its fantastic!!
I thought this quite excellent, intriguing and exciting with a plot to keep me guessing till the end. Fantastically well written with rich detail - just like Hawksmoor - Acroyd's 1984 Whitbread winner. Much more accessible than Hawksmoor in my opinion, but just as entertaining. A cursory glance my see this as another Jack the Ripper story but it certainly isn't , it does however mix fact and fiction combining meetings in Victorian London with Karl Marx and the Victorian commentator George Gissing.
Peter Ackroyd is rightly seen as an authority on the history of London, he brings so much vivid detail to the dark London streets, he takes us right into the heart of the poorest residents of the least desirable areas and brings them right to life on the page. A fairly straightforward plot takes into the then fashionable music halls with the strange song and dance acts that did the rounds of the backstreet theatres. We see the rise of a girl from poverty to become a star on the stage, but we also see a reign of terror start as a brutal murderer stalks the streets. The newspapers of the time dub the perpetrator of the crimes the Limehouse Golem after the mythical Jewish monsters Golems. Many different threads are woven together with the Killer, the stage, Karl Marx studying in the British Library reading room and Babbadge's calculating machine (the forerunner of all computers). We have a courtroom scene that runs concurrently through the story but is critical to the ending - in fact it starts the first page with a hanging in Camberwell Prison.
Short and entertaining it gripped me from start to finish without the massive (yet still entertaining) complexity of Hawksmoor, which required re reading of some chapters. I feel that in another authors hands this story would have been another Jack the Ripper story but with Akroyd's attention to the fine points the streets become real, in fact the only drawback is the length at only 280 pages in paperback - why couldn't it be a doorstop?? .All in all - dark and entertaining with never a dull page I thoroughly recommend this lively short novel.
I thought this quite excellent, intriguing and exciting with a plot to keep me guessing till the end. Fantastically well written with rich detail - just like Hawksmoor - Acroyd's 1984 Whitbread winner. Much more accessible than Hawksmoor in my opinion, but just as entertaining. A cursory glance my see this as another Jack the Ripper story but it certainly isn't , it does however mix fact and fiction combining meetings in Victorian London with Karl Marx and the Victorian commentator George Gissing.
Peter Ackroyd is rightly seen as an authority on the history of London, he brings so much vivid detail to the dark London streets, he takes us right into the heart of the poorest residents of the least desirable areas and brings them right to life on the page. A fairly straightforward plot takes into the then fashionable music halls with the strange song and dance acts that did the rounds of the backstreet theatres. We see the rise of a girl from poverty to become a star on the stage, but we also see a reign of terror start as a brutal murderer stalks the streets. The newspapers of the time dub the perpetrator of the crimes the Limehouse Golem after the mythical Jewish monsters Golems. Many different threads are woven together with the Killer, the stage, Karl Marx studying in the British Library reading room and Babbadge's calculating machine (the forerunner of all computers). We have a courtroom scene that runs concurrently through the story but is critical to the ending - in fact it starts the first page with a hanging in Camberwell Prison.
Short and entertaining it gripped me from start to finish without the massive (yet still entertaining) complexity of Hawksmoor, which required re reading of some chapters. I feel that in another authors hands this story would have been another Jack the Ripper story but with Akroyd's attention to the fine points the streets become real, in fact the only drawback is the length at only 280 pages in paperback - why couldn't it be a doorstop?? .All in all - dark and entertaining with never a dull page I thoroughly recommend this lively short novel.
