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brigdhThe Sixth Victim by Tessa Harris. The first in a forthcoming murder mystery series set in London during the 1880s. That time and place is famous for one particular murder mystery – Jack the Ripper – but Harris takes an interesting approach by having the Ripper murders be merely the background to her own story. Constance Piper is a young woman in the extremely impoverished Whitechapel district who makes her living through a combination of selling flowers and pickpocketing. Her teacher and friend, Emily Tindall, a well-educated upper class missionary, has taught her to dream of a better life for herself, but Emily has gone missing and no one except Constance seems to care. Meanwhile, the headless body of an unidentified woman is discovered on the construction site that will eventually become Scotland Yard. The police claim it has no connection to Jack the Ripper, but are they right? And can Constance figure out who the woman was?
The story switches between two narrators. Constance, the first POV, is mostly just trying to live a normal life, and does not particularly want to solve mysteries. Her neighbours' and family's ghoulish interest in following updates of the Ripper case scares her, and though she wants to figure out what happened to Emily, she doesn't have trouble believing such a well-off woman might have left town without bothering to tell her poor student. The other POV is Emily herself, who – not a spoiler, since this is revealed in the very first pages – is now a ghost. Emily wants to make contact with Constance and direct her towards a problem Emily tried to solve while she was alive herself, which eventually connects to that nameless torso. Emily's narration frequently speaks directly to the reader, throwing in hints such as "now I will reveal this" or "you'll have to wait for me to tell you that".
I thought this was an awesome idea for a murder series: taking on the tropes of Victorian Spiritualism by giving the detective her very own spirit guide! Unfortunately Harris's writing falls flat on multiple fronts.
One of the problems – as I suppose should have been self-evident – is that having a nearly omniscient ghost as a main character means that far too much is revealed to the reader far too soon. One lengthy subplot in The Sixth Victim is whether the headless torso is evidence that a doctor killed his missing wife. But we know, from literally the very first scene the doctor is in, that he couldn't have murdered his wife, since invisible Emily is witness to scenes that don't fit with that scenario. Why then does The Sixth Victim spend something like a third of its running time on the red herring of the doctor? There's just scene after scene after scene of ~oooh, maybe he did it~ when we know all along that he didn't! It's simultaneously boring and frustrating.
When Harris does reveal the actual answers to her mysteries, they're... dumb. Sorry. I'm trying to think of a more evocative, more specific word to describe the ending of this book, but it's just dumb. The mystery of Emily's disappearance and death turns out to involve Freemasons, child sex rings, a conspiracy of the upper levels of police, the church, and business, and illegal abortions. It honestly reads like Harris took every single speculation that everyone has ever made about Jack the Ripper and threw them all together into a single incoherent plot. And it's still better than the explanation for the doctor's missing wife! ...She turns out to be crazy. At first I thought this was because her husband gave her syphilis (there's a whole subplot about him being obsessed with syphilis), but then it turns out that he actually gave her gonorrhea, which as far as I know has no mental symptoms. She's just crazy because she's barren and her jealousy of other women and desire for a baby has driven her mad. Those Victorian women, right? Hysterical all over the place. Anyway, the mad wife proceeds to murder Mary Jane Kelly (notoriously the most violent of the Jack the Ripper murders) because she thinks Kelly is having an affair with her husband, when he was really just arranging to adopt her baby. All of the mutilation and missing organs traditionally attributed to Jack the Ripper? Nope, just a crazy woman being crazy.
I had other problems with The Sixth Victim as well (Emily's character in particular is inconsistent: she's described both as having a degree from Oxford and as being so poor that her salary as a part-time teacher at a charity school is the only thing keeping her off the streets; she never has the sort of culture clash I would expect from a Victorian woman raised in wealth introduced to a London slum), but it really is the dumb ending that's going to stop me from reading any other books by Harris, no matter how intriguing their premise.
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie. A modern-day take on Don Quixote (Quichotte is the spelling of the eponymous hero's name in the French operatic version of the story). This time around, Quichotte is an elderly Indian man now living in the United States, making his living as a traveling salesman for his cousin's (who owns a massive drug company) new opioid painkillers. As Quichotte drives from small town to small town, staying alone in rundown motels, he becomes obsessed with TV – all types of TV, from reality shows to the news to infomercials to reruns of black-and-white movies to sitcoms – and in particular with Salma R, former Bollywood star turned US TV star turned talk show host, who has an Oprah-like level of popularity and significance. Quichotte sets out to win her heart by a journey both literal (a road trip from Nowhere, Out West to NYC) and metaphysical (going through the mystical "Seven Valleys of Love", which involves giving up belief and knowledge and desire and all material belongings, before finally uniting with the beloved). Along the way he accidentally summons into existence a teen boy named Sancho, who may be Quichotte and Salma's son from the future or may merely be a figment of Quichotte's imagination.
Quichotte's is not the only story going on in this novel, however. Salma gets her own chapters, revealing her troubled childhood and addiction to the very drugs Quichotte sold, as well as her reaction to the mysterious stalker letters Quichotte keeps sending her. Sancho struggles to figure out who he is and how he can become a "real boy", complete with assistance from a talking cricket and the blue fairy. Quichotte's cousin, the owner of the multimillion drug company, deals with the American-Indian community while seeking to avoid arrest for bribing doctors to overprescribe his drugs. And outside of all of this, we have Brother, who is the author of the novel Quichotte, yes, the very one you're reading. Brother's "real" life has prominent parallels to Quichotte's: they both grew up in the same neighborhood of Bombay and have mixed feelings about their move from India to the US; they both have long-estranged sisters; they both have troubled relationships with their sons.
There is a lot of stuff going on in this novel, in case you haven't guessed. And I haven't even mentioned the Elon Musk surrogate (here named Evel Cent and obsessed with travel between dimensions rather than spaceflight), the thread about increasing American racism, the secret military cabal of computer hackers, the brief but odd flight of fantasy about Trump voters turning into woolly mammoths, cheesy spy thrillers, and, oh yeah, the literal end of the universe. With so much stuff, inevitably some of it doesn't work (I was particularly annoyed by a rant about 'cancel culture' late in the book), but a surprising amount of it does, and hangs together in unexpected ways.
Overall, it's a rolicking, bouncing satire that lingers less and seems to have less to say than many of Rushdie's books. There's not much of a message below all the dazzling twists and turns ("the opioid crisis is bad", I guess, is the main takeaway? Not a particularly deep conclusion, that). Which is fine! Not every novel has to Explain the Condition of the World Today. But it's oddly the closest I've ever seen Rushdie come to writing a Beach Read – though still with all the allusions and stylistic flourishes that are typical Rushdie.
My main complaint is that, despite the basic premise of "Don Quixote but with American TV", Quichotte does not actually seem to be all that influenced by TV. Sure, we're told frequently enough that he watches too much TV, but nothing about his speaking style (described as old fashioned, mannerly, and charming), his behavior (gentle, slow, determined), his approach to life (philosophical, forgetful), or really anything else about him resembles modern TV in the slightest. In fact, the main influences on Quichotte are medieval Persian poetry (the source of the Seven Valleys of Love, which together form the main structure of the novel) and two old-school sci-fi short stories: one the well-known The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (with its famous final line, "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out") and the other the much more obscure Pictures Don't Lie by Katherine MacLean. All three of these are repeatedly referenced by characters throughout the book, but don't have any connection to Quichotte's supposed diet of nonstop TV. I definitely got the vibe that Rushdie had the idea of updating Quixote from chivalric romances to their modern mental-junk-food equivalent, but doesn't actually watch enough trash TV himself to describe or reference or include it in any detailed way. Which does make me wonder why he decided to write a book about it, but oh well.
Quichotte is a lot of unexpected fun, but I wouldn't count on it becoming Rushdie's defining work.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The story switches between two narrators. Constance, the first POV, is mostly just trying to live a normal life, and does not particularly want to solve mysteries. Her neighbours' and family's ghoulish interest in following updates of the Ripper case scares her, and though she wants to figure out what happened to Emily, she doesn't have trouble believing such a well-off woman might have left town without bothering to tell her poor student. The other POV is Emily herself, who – not a spoiler, since this is revealed in the very first pages – is now a ghost. Emily wants to make contact with Constance and direct her towards a problem Emily tried to solve while she was alive herself, which eventually connects to that nameless torso. Emily's narration frequently speaks directly to the reader, throwing in hints such as "now I will reveal this" or "you'll have to wait for me to tell you that".
I thought this was an awesome idea for a murder series: taking on the tropes of Victorian Spiritualism by giving the detective her very own spirit guide! Unfortunately Harris's writing falls flat on multiple fronts.
One of the problems – as I suppose should have been self-evident – is that having a nearly omniscient ghost as a main character means that far too much is revealed to the reader far too soon. One lengthy subplot in The Sixth Victim is whether the headless torso is evidence that a doctor killed his missing wife. But we know, from literally the very first scene the doctor is in, that he couldn't have murdered his wife, since invisible Emily is witness to scenes that don't fit with that scenario. Why then does The Sixth Victim spend something like a third of its running time on the red herring of the doctor? There's just scene after scene after scene of ~oooh, maybe he did it~ when we know all along that he didn't! It's simultaneously boring and frustrating.
When Harris does reveal the actual answers to her mysteries, they're... dumb. Sorry. I'm trying to think of a more evocative, more specific word to describe the ending of this book, but it's just dumb. The mystery of Emily's disappearance and death turns out to involve Freemasons, child sex rings, a conspiracy of the upper levels of police, the church, and business, and illegal abortions. It honestly reads like Harris took every single speculation that everyone has ever made about Jack the Ripper and threw them all together into a single incoherent plot. And it's still better than the explanation for the doctor's missing wife! ...She turns out to be crazy. At first I thought this was because her husband gave her syphilis (there's a whole subplot about him being obsessed with syphilis), but then it turns out that he actually gave her gonorrhea, which as far as I know has no mental symptoms. She's just crazy because she's barren and her jealousy of other women and desire for a baby has driven her mad. Those Victorian women, right? Hysterical all over the place. Anyway, the mad wife proceeds to murder Mary Jane Kelly (notoriously the most violent of the Jack the Ripper murders) because she thinks Kelly is having an affair with her husband, when he was really just arranging to adopt her baby. All of the mutilation and missing organs traditionally attributed to Jack the Ripper? Nope, just a crazy woman being crazy.
I had other problems with The Sixth Victim as well (Emily's character in particular is inconsistent: she's described both as having a degree from Oxford and as being so poor that her salary as a part-time teacher at a charity school is the only thing keeping her off the streets; she never has the sort of culture clash I would expect from a Victorian woman raised in wealth introduced to a London slum), but it really is the dumb ending that's going to stop me from reading any other books by Harris, no matter how intriguing their premise.
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie. A modern-day take on Don Quixote (Quichotte is the spelling of the eponymous hero's name in the French operatic version of the story). This time around, Quichotte is an elderly Indian man now living in the United States, making his living as a traveling salesman for his cousin's (who owns a massive drug company) new opioid painkillers. As Quichotte drives from small town to small town, staying alone in rundown motels, he becomes obsessed with TV – all types of TV, from reality shows to the news to infomercials to reruns of black-and-white movies to sitcoms – and in particular with Salma R, former Bollywood star turned US TV star turned talk show host, who has an Oprah-like level of popularity and significance. Quichotte sets out to win her heart by a journey both literal (a road trip from Nowhere, Out West to NYC) and metaphysical (going through the mystical "Seven Valleys of Love", which involves giving up belief and knowledge and desire and all material belongings, before finally uniting with the beloved). Along the way he accidentally summons into existence a teen boy named Sancho, who may be Quichotte and Salma's son from the future or may merely be a figment of Quichotte's imagination.
Quichotte's is not the only story going on in this novel, however. Salma gets her own chapters, revealing her troubled childhood and addiction to the very drugs Quichotte sold, as well as her reaction to the mysterious stalker letters Quichotte keeps sending her. Sancho struggles to figure out who he is and how he can become a "real boy", complete with assistance from a talking cricket and the blue fairy. Quichotte's cousin, the owner of the multimillion drug company, deals with the American-Indian community while seeking to avoid arrest for bribing doctors to overprescribe his drugs. And outside of all of this, we have Brother, who is the author of the novel Quichotte, yes, the very one you're reading. Brother's "real" life has prominent parallels to Quichotte's: they both grew up in the same neighborhood of Bombay and have mixed feelings about their move from India to the US; they both have long-estranged sisters; they both have troubled relationships with their sons.
There is a lot of stuff going on in this novel, in case you haven't guessed. And I haven't even mentioned the Elon Musk surrogate (here named Evel Cent and obsessed with travel between dimensions rather than spaceflight), the thread about increasing American racism, the secret military cabal of computer hackers, the brief but odd flight of fantasy about Trump voters turning into woolly mammoths, cheesy spy thrillers, and, oh yeah, the literal end of the universe. With so much stuff, inevitably some of it doesn't work (I was particularly annoyed by a rant about 'cancel culture' late in the book), but a surprising amount of it does, and hangs together in unexpected ways.
Overall, it's a rolicking, bouncing satire that lingers less and seems to have less to say than many of Rushdie's books. There's not much of a message below all the dazzling twists and turns ("the opioid crisis is bad", I guess, is the main takeaway? Not a particularly deep conclusion, that). Which is fine! Not every novel has to Explain the Condition of the World Today. But it's oddly the closest I've ever seen Rushdie come to writing a Beach Read – though still with all the allusions and stylistic flourishes that are typical Rushdie.
My main complaint is that, despite the basic premise of "Don Quixote but with American TV", Quichotte does not actually seem to be all that influenced by TV. Sure, we're told frequently enough that he watches too much TV, but nothing about his speaking style (described as old fashioned, mannerly, and charming), his behavior (gentle, slow, determined), his approach to life (philosophical, forgetful), or really anything else about him resembles modern TV in the slightest. In fact, the main influences on Quichotte are medieval Persian poetry (the source of the Seven Valleys of Love, which together form the main structure of the novel) and two old-school sci-fi short stories: one the well-known The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (with its famous final line, "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out") and the other the much more obscure Pictures Don't Lie by Katherine MacLean. All three of these are repeatedly referenced by characters throughout the book, but don't have any connection to Quichotte's supposed diet of nonstop TV. I definitely got the vibe that Rushdie had the idea of updating Quixote from chivalric romances to their modern mental-junk-food equivalent, but doesn't actually watch enough trash TV himself to describe or reference or include it in any detailed way. Which does make me wonder why he decided to write a book about it, but oh well.
Quichotte is a lot of unexpected fun, but I wouldn't count on it becoming Rushdie's defining work.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
