Mr. Timothy

I've ranted and raved on occasion about inappropriate applications of the adjective "Dickensian," so I couldn't help but be amused that it was nowhere to be seen in the flyleaf blurb for Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy. Unlike Peter Carey's better-known (and somewhat more complex) Jack Maggs, Mr. Timothy is less a rewrite of a Dickens novel--here, obviously, A Christmas Carol--and more a sequel to it, with some metafictional reflections built in. "Tiny Tim," now grown up, has left behind his crutch but failed to find either a calling or an identity. Vainly attempting to elude his "Uncle N" (a.k.a. Ebenezer Scrooge), he takes up residence in a brothel and finds himself teaching the keeper how to read. However, he slowly finds himself drawn into action against a white slavery ring, of the sort later sensationally exposed by W. T. Stead.

Bayard wisely makes no attempt to channel Dickens' style, although Dickens would have approved of the novel's emphasis on London's geography. Instead, Bayard delicately weaves Dickensian allusions into the narrative, as scenes suddenly coalesce into moments reminiscent of Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House; the explicit allusion to The Mystery of Edwin Drood feels comparatively clumsy. (Savvy street urchin Colin the Melodious, however, seems to have wandered in from Les Miserables, although we're probably supposed to be thinking of Oliver Twist's Artful Dodger.) A Christmas Carol itself quite literally haunts the novel in the form of the imagined ghost of Bob Cratchit--the ghost Timothy is attempting to lay. But A Christmas Carol as a story also haunts Timothy, who, in a series of letters to his dead father, tries to work through the problem of being "narrated." For Timothy, the stories circulated about him by both his father and Scrooge entrap him in the sentimentalized role of what he calls the "Good Son"; indeed, he remembers himself attempting to become the noble cripple envisioned by his father. The didactic narrative births the exemplary child, in other words, not vice-versa. Unlike the brothel keeper, Mrs. Sharpe, who finds in her newfound literacy the possibility of escape into previously unexplored worlds, Timothy largely sees plots as traps. And his own language fails him on a regular basis: in a key moment, he misreads Mrs. Sharpe's ledgers; he lacks Colin's verbal facility; he cannot really communicate with the escaped Italian girl, Philomela; he has a hard time talking to the quasi-Bucket figure, Inspector Surtees.

As the narrative proceeds, things get increasingly violent. While the reader may at first wonder if she has somehow picked up an action thriller, the plot's intense physicality and "melodrama" (as Timothy himself calls it) is key to Timothy's quest for self. To become his own person, Timothy needs to test the limits of his previously crippled body; he can't come to terms with his father's narrative legacy until he has shed the last remnants of the now-ghostly crutch. Yet Timothy's physical liberation itself creates a new willingness on his part to tell stories: as he "gives" Philomela to his childless brother and sister-in-law, he finds himself comforting her by imagining an idyllic group future for them all. In finding homes for both Philomela and Colin (the latter with Scrooge), Timothy winds up as a kind of author-surrogate, inventing new families for once-lost children. And, in good Victorian fashion, Timothy resolves his own situation by joining a naturalist's expedition. Once the ghosts of both his father and his crutch have been laid to rest, Timothy himself winds up symbolically exploring unfamiliar territories; he comes to terms with the past and discovers the possibility of a future.

While there are occasional missteps, including a couple of moments which resemble the worst possible cliches from detective novels, Mr. Timothy is worth a good look. Along the way, though, I couldn't help but silently protest the neo-Victorian obsession with all things sexual--as if it were impossible to write "realistically" (or even fantastically!) about the Victorians without making sex a key referent. I'm not complaining that the sex is there; I'm complaining that sex has become a kind of narrative tic. This is particularly frustrating to me because sex isn't absent from Victorian fiction, let alone any other kind of Victorian prose. (Remember, one of my subspecialties is anti-Catholic literature. Talk about sexually obsessive writing...) In other words, I don't find that seamy (or steamy) sex plays the kind of revelatory role to which so many authors assign it.