Just Finished Reading: The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams (FP: 2012)

London, 1840. As England bakes under an unforgiving sun and London suffers a series of economic disasters Catherine Sorgeiul, recently out of hospital, must suffer the heat and the boredom alone as her uncle stays locked in his room – sometimes alone, sometimes with friends – doing God knows what until the early hours of the morning. But when a shop girl is killed just streets away and laid out in a bizarre fashion for all the world to see Catherine begins to wonder what her uncle does at night. As the killings go on and the police are baffled as to where to start Catherine’s fears open buried episodes in her childhood where she plotted the deaths of her parents and her brother. Convinced that some evil within her is attracting the killer she wanders the dangerous East End streets after dark looking for absolution and maybe death whilst hoping that it will not appear in the shape of her uncle or one of his friends. But Catherine knows from bitter experience that not everything she sees or hears actually happens. Sometimes she is convinced that she can see into the future or into the very mind of the killer. At others that items in her bedroom are going missing or that someone else is writing in her secret diary. Can her fears be the result of an overactive imagination brought on by childhood trauma or is there really a killer living in her very midst?

I am a sucker for Victorian crime novels (or at least books based during that fascinating period). Obviously channelling the much later case of Jack the Ripper this was an atmospheric piece that, at least in my mind, didn’t quite work. The sense of menace was certainly there and the various characters were well drawn. What rather annoyed me, as it does in movies, is the idea of the unreliable narrator – basically someone (like Catherine) – who does not know themselves if what they experience, and relay to the reader, is real or not. So we poor ‘observers’ can’t really make judgements of guilt and so on because we can never be sure of our foundations. It’s all rather annoying and unnecessary I feel. I was also confused, at least initially, by the sudden change of perspective into another characters eyes which I only realised was happening when I checked back with the particular chapter heading. Then there was a rather weird lesbian sub-plot which honestly didn’t add very much except the odd raised eyebrow. Take that out and the storyline is hardly affected.

Generally this was a reasonable read. It wasn’t exactly a struggle but I did find it taking longer to read that I’d planned or imagined. Again it wasn’t exactly boring but I found myself unable to get particularly involved in any of the characters’ lives so didn’t exactly rush to find out what was going to happen next. Not exactly as promising as the cover suggested.

[2015 Reading Challenge: A Book based entirely on its cover – COMPLETE (9/50)]