The Fiend in Human

John MacLachlan Gray's The Fiend in Human: A Victorian Thriller (2003) is a neo-Victorian sensation novel, set largely in the criminal and sexual subcultures of mid-nineteenth-century London. It is most assuredly not "Dickensian," as the dustjacket flap would over-enthusiastically have it. Nor is it a "thriller," since the requisite thrills would require a better command of plot pacing, suspense and misdirection. But Gray is most in his element when it comes to the business of sensation. The novel's protagonist, Edmund Whitty, is a down-at-heels, drug-addicted scandal-sheet journalist responsible for naming the perpetrator of a series of murderous attacks against prostitutes. "Chokee Bill," Whitty's character, soon takes on a life of his own: other scandal sheets appropriate him, street balladeers take him up, and both upper- and lower-class gossips turn him into an omnipresent menace. Whitty himself cares little about the moral issues involved; he quite cheerfully gussies up scandalous narratives for profit and sees no particular problem with Chokee Bill's quasi-fictionalized status. Even when it becomes clear that the police have nabbed the wrong man, a veteran forger named William Ryan, Whitty's motives remain financial: both he and a patterer, Henry Owler, see Ryan's narrative as a profitable goldmine. It's only near the end that Whitty's behavior acquires some tincture of ethics. The better to emphasize Whitty's mixed motives, Gray fills the novel with mock-street ballads and newspaper columns, filled with heavy-breathing prose, fierce protestations of journalistic honor and authenticity, promises of scandalous revelations, and so forth. As a result, the novel becomes less a "thriller" than a study of how "thrill" itself works its way through popular culture--a meta-thriller, in a sense.

Like many neo-Victorian novelists (Michel Faber is an obvious recent example), Gray is also obsessed with Victorian commodity culture. Just as sensation has its own market value, so too do female bodies, rats, slums, drugs, and so forth. The prostitutes, for example, see themselves by and large as businesswomen, turning their bodies into a rational source of profit. This vision of Victorian culture is very much in a post-Carlylean "Gospel of Mammonism" mode, in which characters worship at the shrine of the holy guinea. As it turns out, the killer's obsession with the prostitute's potentially disease-ridden body, circulating at will through the upper echelons of masculine society, finds its ironic parallel in the infectious nature of the desire for monetary gain. We are constantly reminded that, after all, the sardonically-titled (and infinitely sub-letted) "Holy Land" slum immediately backs onto one of the most elegant neighborhoods in London; the upper class simultaneously profits off a welter of corruption and tries to maintain an artificial spatial distance.

While not a long novel, the clunky plot makes it a somewhat longer read than absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, Gray handles both language and atmosphere well, and his representation of the scandal market may be interesting to Victorianists.