With a new novel each year, Robert Edric cannot have much time for courting London’s literary establishment, but does he stay at home in East Yorkshire? The London Satyr is set in 1890s London and to me, a Londoner, it seems not merely researched but felt, as if its author has tramped the streets and occupied the world of his characters.
With a new novel each year, Robert Edric cannot have much time for courting London’s literary establishment, but does he stay at home in East Yorkshire? The London Satyr is set in 1890s London and to me, a Londoner, it seems not merely researched but felt, as if its author has tramped the streets and occupied the world of his characters. But the same feels true of Edric’s many other novels, and he could not have had time to write them as well as tramp the Arctic (The Broken Lands), Tasmania (Elysium), Zaire (The Book of the Heathen) and so forth, so perhaps he stays at home after all and just wakes up each year with something like a new language in his head, fully formed. What does the man eat for breakfast?
The London Satyr is narrated by a poor photographer, Charles Webster, who uses his official position at Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre to obtain costumes which he rents out to a sinister pornographer called Marlow. He thinks he is safe, and that his relatively harmless deceits will procure security for himself and his family. But he is aware of the danger:
Some lies, I knew, blossomed like crystal salts dropped into water — ever more complicated and yet ever more fragile as they grew and multiplied, always ready to shatter and to disappear, to turn from breathtaking miracle to powdery disappointment at the first solitary careless word or blow.
Bram Stoker, the theatre’s manager, suspects Webster’s involvement and, as the London Vigilance Committee’s net closes round Marlow, Webster is implicated. His wife, meanwhile, is setting herself up as a professional medium with the help of their dull daughter, Cora. He is pulled in every direction, as well as tortured by the earlier loss of another daughter.
Place, time and atmosphere are conjured with impeccable lightness of touch. There are occasional references to contemporary features — clothes, newspapers, drink, building projects — but each is in its proper place, unforced. There are no flashy set pieces, no overt signposting or name-checking. The setting is comfortable with its particularity, intimately known. Yet The London Satyr is unmistakably the work of this author. Cora is said to have ignored a remark ‘and all it might have been intended to imply’; it is frequently ‘beyond’ a character to achieve something.
Such characteristic phrases are the visible ripples of themes that run like sinews through Edric’s novels. Sometimes this is made overt through context — The Kingdom of Ruins clearly complements Peacetime; Salvage complements Gathering the Water — but some patterns are embedded more deeply in his work. There is the technician — Webster, in this novel — who is diverted from his technical affairs into dealing with human affairs; the intractable nature of those affairs; and above all the sense of loss:
Did I ever imagine that such an unbearable loss could be borne for so long? Never. Did I ever imagine that the years since my small daughter’s death would pass with so little ease to be gained? Never.
If you substitute a relevant phrase for ‘my small daughter’s death’, this sentence could be taken from any of Edric’s novels and yet, for all the exhaustion it expresses, somehow it appears here fresh.
Not content with his annual new novel, Edric has favoured his growing number of fans this year with an extra trinket from the bottom drawer. The Lives of the Savages is a dazzling novella about Bonnie and Clyde, narrated by the teenage boy who accompanied them (and Buck and Blanche) on their killing spree. While the story itself is lean and driven by action, it is charged by Edric’s implacable prose, in a feat of brilliant ventriloquism, with a rich sense of loss foretold.
The quantity, quality and range of Robert Edric’s work are quite flabbergasting. If his talent doesn’t win him the Booker prize then the law of averages must, eventually.
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