Daniel O'Thunder

Cross-country flights are, if nothing else, good for getting books read.  One of the novels I finished was Ian Weir's neo-Victorian Daniel O'Thunder (2009), which, like many neo-Victorian novels, draws heavily upon sensation fiction--most noticeably Wilkie Collins in this instance.  However, the narrative also owes something to Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and, more loosely, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (although, no doubt unintentionally, there's also a bit of True History of Joshua Davidson here as well).  Just as significantly, the novel owes something to the New Testament.  Five first-person narrators (one of whom appears only once) and one third-person narrator (whose bits are also written by one of the first-person narrators--more on that in a moment) relate their encounters with and the influence of the charismatic Daniel O'Thunder, a former Irish-pugilist-turned-quasi-Messianic-evangelist in early Victorian England.  All four of our main narrators--or, at least, the purported main narrators, of which more in a moment--are a bit on the scummy side, although less or more redeemable: there's Jack, a failed clergyman who comes to London to make his living in the theatre, and who turns out to be (understatement) a seriously unpleasant piece of work; Nell, a foul-mouthed adolescent prostitute; John Thomas ("Jaunty") Rennert, a conman who recruited Daniel into the army and later managed him as a fighter; and William Piper, a hack journalist with a taste for the sensational.  All of the narrators figure at some point in each other's segments, with Jack and Jaunty, the most egotistical and self-inflating characters, tending to fare rather poorly when they appear elsewhere; that being said, the narratives do not completely subvert each other, although Jack turns out to be excessively fond of the sin of omission.  (Less so once you realize that he also authors the "Devil" sections.)    

As I've said, one of the novel's most obvious intertexts is the Bible itself.  The illiterate Daniel, who takes on the aura of a Christ figure, consorts with the poor and downtrodden, gathers disciples, and at one or two points, appears to work miracles--most notably, raising the dead (well, possibly).   When he rescues some of his followers from a fire, he looks as though he "harrowed Hell" (320).  Nevertheless, he's also not exactly the pattern of forgiveness--he doesn't react well when Jaunty does him in during his trial, let alone when he thinks that William still believes in the guilt of an about-to-be-executed friend--and as Redeemer figures go, his pugilistic profession and disinterest in chastity make him an awkward fit for Christ.  What is more important, then, is how the other characters figure his exploits and charisma.  Piper is the most skeptical of the four, supportive yet, as he admits, still unable to make up his mind if O'Thunder's behavior derives from "madness, or something else" (310)--he's the novel's Doubting Thomas, a job he shares with one-time narrator Peggy Sherwood, who worries that "[y]ou cannot have this talk of raising corpses from the dead--especially when it might be true" (294).  Both Piper and Peggy understand and, to a certain extent, fear Daniel as the man who brings not peace, but a sword.  Jack, by contrast, thinks of his narrative as a "Book of Daniel," and links his sometimes loose way with the facts to "Matthew and Mark and Luke and John" (8); later, a physician compares Jack's (momentary) conversion experience to that of Saul on the road to Damascus (172).  Significantly, Jack refers to himself as "the disciple he [Daniel] loved" (257), associating himself with the Gospel of John.  Nevertheless, he misses Daniel's most potent claim to work miracles, the resurrection (maybe) of pugilist Hen Gully, which is witnessed by Nell and Piper, and certainly overstates Daniel's affection (which is actually reserved for Nell).  Nell, who eventually flees to America with Daniel, echoes Mary Magdalene, not least because she has a vision of Daniel after his death.   Jaunty, who betrays Daniel in court, is, as Piper says, Judas (336).  

In a way, Jack sets up the novel less as a parodic Bible and more an extreme reading of what he claims is already there: "Much of what we need to know can only come from the Devil.  Much of what we think we know already does, for the Devil indeed wrote crucial segments of the Holy Bible" (386). In this mockery of debates over Biblical authorship--an Abyssal rather than Higher Criticism, as it were--the Bible turns into one long thwarted bromance between the Devil, who yearned to be "God's special companion," and God, who "pushed him away"--with horrible results, of course (387).  This reading of the bromance between Good and Evil insists that Evil's behavior derives, not from anything innate, but from Good's petulant rejection of Evil's proffered love.  Jack's logic invokes the spectre of both the abuser (you made me treat you badly) and the stalker; even though, as we discover, he is the closest the novel comes to an embodiment of pure evil, Jack cannot see himself as anything but the thwarted, obsessed lover, both of Daniel and of Nell.  When, after the riots, Jack betrays Nell to her former madam, he sadly tells her that "I gave you the opportunity to love me, Nell.  All my life, I have given women just like you the opportunity to love me.  But all of you--you've always failed" (324).  Jack's perverse reading of the Bible thus reflects his own perverse reading of love, in which the man expects love as his due from women (it's telling that at one point, he sends Nell a gift of her own locket).   By contrast, although Daniel isn't Christ, other characters consistently experience his love in terms of giving, especially Nell.  As she puts it, despite being irredeemably tone-deaf, being with Daniel always made her feel "like this was the moment I'd finally be able to sing" (279).  Jack gives nothing, either as a lover or, one suspects, as a narrator.     

That is, in fact, one of the problems haunting our own reading of the book, since it's not clear to what extent Jack's symptomatic reading of the Bible extends to his own narrative method.  Jack is the dominant narrator; in fact, he may well be the only narrator, since he informs us at the beginning that although he has "collected" other narratives relating to Daniel, he has also on occasion "had to go beyond an editor's role and conjure the tale as the teller would surely have told it, had he or she the opportunity" (8).  As Jack does not do us the favor of explaining when he invents another character's voice, the novel calls its own plurality into question: are there really multiple points of view in this text, or--mimicking its own real-life authorship--a single author, who admits to a "vivid imagination" and "an instinct for the dramatic" (11),  "conjuring" up the pretense of different voices? When Nell, for example, notes that the transplanted Jack is "a bit dramatic" (40), is it an ironic echo, or Jack's inky signature seeping through her tale?   Just as murky are the apparenty confessional "Devil" sections, as Jack warns us in the beginning that "I am not the Devil" (7) and consistently objectifies the Devil as someone/something other than himself; if the reader plausibly objects that the Devil is obviously Jack's own evil nature, we're still left with some of the weirder claims that Jack makes for him (he's...on fire, in effect).  Far from being unitary subjects in their own right, the narrators start to fragment on close expection.   Much as Jack's fire-and-brimstone sermon at the beginning is, in part, patchwork "Calvin" and "Dante" (13), a single-authored speech nevertheless marked by other voices, so too do the narrators "themselves" possibly bear the signs of another, more inimical speaker.