Review: Things in Jars

KIDD, Jess, Things in Jars, Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh Scotland UK, 2019.

Octavo; paperback; 404pp. Mild wear; covers a little rubbed and edgeworn; spine creased; some mild scuffing to the front cover. Good.

Way, way back in the day, when I was stupid, I spent a bunch of time in the SCA (the Society for Creative Anachronism) pretending to be a medieval person. In my defense, it was the only way at the time that I could easily and cheaply explore two skillsets that I held in particular interest, namely heraldry and archery, but it also meant that I spent far too much time amongst petty politicians with enormous egos fighting over stuff that meant nothing at all. In the SCA, the goal – often stated, rarely achieved – was to re-create the Middle Ages, not as it was but how it should have been, but for the absence of enlightened social attitudes, antibiotics and personal hygiene. Moments when anything at all like this occurred (especially in a place like Australia, with gum trees, for chrissakes!) were few and far between and usually shattered by someone putting their open can of Coke down next to the boar’s head during a feast. It bewilders me now that anyone in the SCA – or any comparable organization - still thinks that a long term recreation of the past is possible when so many people are involved, with wildly varying levels of commitment, but those fleeting moments when it does work must truly be worth the teeth-grinding idiocy that takes place along the way. How easy then, to just write a book about this stuff?

Long-time readers know that I enjoy reading fiction from the past. For preference, I like to read stories that were written in the time in which they were set. The reasons for this are legion but mostly devolve upon the personal belief that only those who have lived in the time of which they speak can truly write about it. This is not to say that there are not any great writers of historical fiction out there today, or that no-one has ever been able to project themselves and their readers into another time and place in order to relate a compelling narrative; anyone who’s ever read a Georgette Heyer novel can tell you otherwise. It’s just that, as a particular writing style, it’s a high-wire act – one misstep and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Sometimes the point of the exercise is to conflate two disparate genres of writing, for the purposes of humour, or intellectual discussion. Thus, we have Lindsey Davis’s Marcus Didius Falco novels which place a Raymond Chandleresque private detective on the streets of ancient Rome; or Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose which inserts an investigative monk with staunchly Twentieth Century attitudes deep within the Medieval Church. These are deliberate points of departure away from the realms of straight Historical Fiction, which more traditionally include such titles as the Horatio Hornblower series of novels by C.S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian’s oeuvre, or – as mentioned - the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer. However, as anyone who’s ever visited Lindsey Davis’s website can attest, attention to historical detail is paramount because, despite the purpose behind the work, one false anachronistic note ringing out in the background will derail the entire exercise.

Many modern writers have chiseled out niche sub-genres of the Historical Fiction format meaning that we now have Historical Crime Fiction and – fuelled mainly by notions of Steampunk – Historical Fantastic Fiction, usually set in a pseudo-Victorian era. There are also further refinements and blendings of these into sub-sub-genres, such as Victorian Occult Detective Fiction, to name but one. Jess Kidd’s book Things in Jars falls squarely into this latter category. Punctilious historical accuracy is still the key issue here however, despite the liberties taken with the scenario and a crucial point, often overlooked, is the audience.

We are wired for genre. Due to our exposure to Cinema and Television and the way these things are marketed (along with Books these days, because the marketing model has been adopted in that sphere also in order to shift units), we have become instinctual recognisers of genre formats. Moments after the opening credits, we automatically spot The Girl; minutes later we’ve copped The Guy; now we know that, but for a Meet Cute, some Screwball Comedy and an almost Tragic Misunderstanding, the rest is Happily Ever After. We don’t even have to think about it. It just happens. If it didn’t, we would feel gypped and we’d complain. A lot. However, that’s just us; what about books written ages ago; what about the impact on their contemporary audience, one without our social programming? Let’s take a look at a sadly misunderstood and poorly treated classic:

Pride and Prejudice is not a novel written for a modern audience. Jane Austen’s concerns were very particular and her reasons for writing the book have been discussed at length by better commentators than I. It has been made into cinematic and televisual iterations time and again and each of those versions is predicated upon the demands of a modern audience and what it wants to experience. Moments after the opening credits, we are introduced to Elizabeth Bennett; shortly thereafter Mr. D’Arcy is revealed. Now we know that it’s just a Meet Cute, some Screwball Comedy and an almost Tragic Misunderstanding along the way to blah, blah, blah. This is what Pride and Prejudice has become: a schmaltzy swoon-fest. But it’s not.

One reason for the novel’s enduring popularity is that it can be streamlined into a Hollywood blockbuster in the manner outlined. It has good bones, in the sense of it being a love story, and a devastating understanding of human and social psychology which allows it to be layered over many social scenarios. Austen was incredibly good at this stuff – the fact that Emma could be re-made as “Clueless” shows just how adaptable her material can be. But being able to do this with the book drags it away from what it originally was – a Regency novel for Regency readers. If you de-purpose Pride and Prejudice, you can do almost anything to it – set it in space; stage it as a puppet show; even cast F***ing! Keira! Bloody! Knightley! (Ahem.) as Lizzie Bennett (unbelievable!), but then you turn it into a Mills & Boon knock-off and that defeats the author’s original intention.

This book is about a woman without any traction in the matrimonial stakes of her culture. We are explicitly told that – in a world where a good marriage is crucial – Elizabeth Bennett has only two things on her side: wit and a pair of fine eyes. Everything else stands in her way. D’Arcy, on the other hand, has and is everything desired in a husband, but there’s no way that he’s going to even consider Lizzie Bennett. We are told in no uncertain terms that the possibility of Lizzie becoming Mrs. Fitzwilliam D’Arcy by the last page is so remote as to be functionally impossible. And yet, it is the magic of this work that it happens, and that we believe in it happening. For us it’s just “Aww – another happy ending!”; for Regency readers it would have been outrageous; a veritable call to arms.

Think about Wickham. He is set up as the villain of the piece, although initially, he is presented to us as Elizabeth’s more realistic option in the property distribution game. He is good-looking and has a solid career and income; his background is a little shady but then so is Elizabeth’s, with many socially awkward details for anyone who cares to scratch the surface. Nevertheless, Wickham is on a roll; he’s making his way; and Lizzie recognizes this. So too, does a Regency reader – we may think of Wickham as a sleazebag on the make, but we’ve been educated to think of him that way. No Regency reader would think badly of him for dropping Lizzie in order to court Mary King and her 10,000-pound inheritance. For us, it’s a sharp stab of betrayal: “you scumbag!” we cry; ‘How could you?” But for a contemporary reader it’s a bone saw chill reminder to them and to Lizzie of her place in society, and the fact that she should not over-reach herself in the purely business world of matrimonial attachment. They would simply nod sagely – as does Elizabeth – and turn to the next page. Even at the end when Wickham becomes Elizabeth’s brother-in-law there’s very little acrimony from her about how it came about – it’s the price of doing business and maybe Elizabeth recognizes that Wickham was just as she was, only less idealistic, more open to getting his hands dirty and quicker to seize the nearest option. This is not to say that Wickham isn’t the “bad guy” of the piece; of course he is, but our perception of him has been heightened by our need for genre and we put him up there along with Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter and Hans Gruber; contemporary readers dealt in many more degrees of subtlety than we do.

On purely functional levels, Austen’s fiction is securely anchored in its milieu and for modern audiences some references have slid away from us to become hard to understand. In Sense and Sensibility Colonel Brandon confesses to Elinor that he had previously engaged Mr. Willoughby in a duel, although that word is never used and the whole event is so glossed over as to render it practically opaque to a modern reader’s perusal; Regency readers would have spotted it a mile away, however. It’s the same with Shakespeare – many of his jokes, designed to entertain an audience of his day, are now lost to us and only the long-pondered stabs at meaning provided by academics can give us a vague window onto them.

So, what does all of this mean for Jess Kidd and her novel Things in Jars?

Let me say, right from the start, that Ms. Kidd is a fantastic writer. Her prose cracks and spits with all of the verbal pyrotechnics you’d expect of a writer of (so-called) Literary Fiction. There’s a joy in this writing that is completely engaging and a palpable love for the characters that effusively spills off the page. It has many things to recommend it and it’s clear to see why she won the Costa Short Story Award in 2016.

The book retails an investigation in the career of Bridie Devine, the most renowned female detective of her time, set in and around London in 1863. The crime is the abduction and possible murder of a strange child, born with some unusual physical differences, possibly by circus folk looking for a new attraction, or by anatomists desiring an unusual specimen for their collection. The knot of the investigation is a Gordian one, complicated by the fact that Bridie is being haunted by the ghost of a famous boxer – Ruby Doyle – who is hopelessly in love with her.

There are many things to enjoy about this narrative. The sinister villains are truly sinister and villainous and the dark gloomy descriptions of London with its graveyards, slums and rank laboratories filled with the titular jars all lend the appropriate tone. My only problem is that I don’t believe it. Further, no Victorian reader would buy it either.

Bridie Devine – and her towering maidservant and everyone else around her - is presented to us psychologically as a completely modern person with Twenty-first Century values, determined to brush aside obstructions along the way to obtaining her goals. She smokes, she drinks, she looks men straight in the eye – this is all fine; call me a fan. But this isn’t Victorian London. What this reminded me of mostly, was Caleb Carr’s The Alienist. That novel posits a post-Victorian scenario and peoples it with late Twentieth Century players too, for no good reason. The jarring (sorry!) contrast between such characters and the times in which they’ve been set is a problem that I can’t get across. It’s just like that Coke can suddenly balanced on the roasted snout of the boar’s head at the SCA feast – it knocks down the whole house of cards.

And it’s not as if these kinds of constructions can’t work, and work very well indeed. Anyone who has read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark will know exactly what I mean. The blending of history and fantasy there is downright perfect; nothing leaps out to break the illusion of reality and all of the characters remain faithful to their narrative arcs and their zeitgeist. My takeaway is that stories like Things in Jars are written by Twenty-first Century authors for Twenty-first Century readers and that’s okay; I just wonder what’s the point of setting them in these far-distant places in time when a single misstep can undo everything that the writer is trying to achieve? Reference Lindsey Davis’s constant online arguments with people who tell her that she can’t use the word “corn” when talking about grain in her Ancient Roman crime potboilers (“corn” is a collective noun for grain of any type, a word which pre-dates the discovery of the New World and the introduction of maize – colloquially known as “corn” – into Europe).

In the final analysis, this is a fun read and a refreshing breath of air in a world too often bogged down with bad writing. The pace is cracking, the characters delightful, the story twisty, murky and engaging. Narratively, it’s a little wayward, and I have to admit that I was more interested in the ghost than the unfolding mystery, but then I kind of felt that the writer was too: Ruby Doyle alone is worth the price of admission here. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a (literally) bloody fun one and you won’t feel as though you’ve wasted your time.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.