April's Book Club Choice is Kept a Victorian ‘Mystery’ by writer and critic D J Taylor. The author is particularly well known for his biographies of Thackeray and Orwell which deservedly won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award. His fiction, six novels since 1986, is probably less well known and I must admit to only having read Trespass a satire of 1970s England published in 1998. I read this some time ago with the book club I belong to in Wymondham and it didn’t go down well. Kept, however has had generally good reviews and I have persuaded the club to try D J Taylor again
Kept keeps to our East Anglian theme by being written by a Norwich writer and by being partly set in Norfolk. One of the characters is James Dixey a nefarious Norfolk squire who schemes to marry his mad ward in order to secure her inheritance. Sounds like something from Dickens and in fact it is written in the style of a mid Victorian novel. Many of the reviews have used the word pastiche to describe it. The Book Club’s message board at waiting for your views! Pastiche or not pastiche?
What a struggle this book was and I almost gave it up. I have to admit I skip read much of the last half. However I read enough to be able to try and answer the question posed by Jeff ‘pastiche or not pastiche?’. On the one hand it is a pastiche in the sense that it is a work of art that imitates the style of some previous work (Dickens, Thackeray etc) one of the definitions of the word. On the other hand it isn’t a pastiche, it is not a satirical incongruous hodgepodge (another definition) but I wish it had been. It might then have been more readable. The author obviously knows a huge amount about Victorian Society and has immersed himself in the literature of the period and it shows, he has produced what is essentially an academic exercise, a way of showing off his knowledge of the period. I really enjoyed D J Taylor’s biography of George Orwell and would rank him alongside Peter Ackroyd as a biographer. Ackroyd, however, seems able to write historical fiction in a modest unpretentious way as if he was writing about the present. I think the difference is that Ackroyd lives the past while Taylor just studies it.
Bill
I also struggled with this book. Eventually I decided to read it in instalments. Dickens fashion and it was much easier on the brain. Haven't finished it yet! Maybe the author intended his pastiche to be read in a pastiche like fashion!
Jeff
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