The thrill of the (postmodern neo-Victorian) chase

Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a million copies, while more or less inaugurating the genre of ‘neo-Victorian literature’, whose ornaments are still clogging up the bookshop shelves a quarter of a century later. There have been three other novels since, at least one of them set in the here- and-now, but Palliser’s fifth outing straightaway returns us to the world of creaking lawsuits, high-grade subterfuge and lickerish kitchen-maids in which he made his reputation.

In fact the territory occupied by Rustication is so familiar as to make the case-hardened reader of A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (the last two referenced in the blurb) wonder whether he or she hasn’t travelled this way too often for comfort. It is December 1863, dark, dank and ominous, and to a decayed and apparently haunted house in the Kentish marshlands journeys 17-year-old Richard Shenstone, lately sent down from Cambridge for smoking opium and being involved, in some as yet unexplained way, in the suicide of a similarly intoxicated friend.

If Shenstone, whose self-absorbed diary takes up the greater part of the narrative, is careful not to reveal too many of the circumstances that have brought him back to Kent in disgrace, then the half-dozen mysteries awaiting his inexpert eye are no less tantalising. To the pressing question of his career (disapproving Uncle Thomas has offered him a ticket to the colonies) can be added the strange behaviour of his pinched and ailing mother, the question of his sister Euphemia’s love life and its possible consequences, and the chill silence that hangs over his father’s recent death. Solace is provided by Betsy, the teenage maidservant, who permits late-night visits to her garret.