"Here we go again!" Peter Ackroyd brings his own special magic to a tale of the early days of the British music hall, bloody murder and the British Library. Real life characters such as Karl Marx, George Gissing (author of Victorian social realism novels, such as New Grub Street) and Dan Leno (wildly popular music hall star, in his day, and the originator of comic roles that are still recognizable in classic British pantos) are cunningly integrated into the story of a mysterious London serial killer who incorporates the wilder excesses of Jack the Ripper with the style of the mythical anti-hero of the "penny dreadfuls," Spring-heeled Jack.
To say much more would be risking serious spoilers, and that would be a great shame, as Ackroyd consistently surprises, not only creating a beautifully convincing pastiche of the style and substance of Victorian popular entertainment (including, to quote Thomas de Quincey, as Ackroyd repeated does, "Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts"), but also uses Victorian attitudes to race, sexuality, class and justice to make some intersting and important points about attitudes in our own era.
This novel was pretty faithfully adapted into the 2016 movie The Limehouse Golem, with Bill Nighy, which is unapologetically gruesome, but well worth watching.
To say much more would be risking serious spoilers, and that would be a great shame, as Ackroyd consistently surprises, not only creating a beautifully convincing pastiche of the style and substance of Victorian popular entertainment (including, to quote Thomas de Quincey, as Ackroyd repeated does, "Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts"), but also uses Victorian attitudes to race, sexuality, class and justice to make some intersting and important points about attitudes in our own era.
This novel was pretty faithfully adapted into the 2016 movie The Limehouse Golem, with Bill Nighy, which is unapologetically gruesome, but well worth watching.
