Delightfully Morbid, Acutely Droll

The German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin once wrote: “Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.” The theatre is a familiar medium for John MacLachlan Gray, who is the author of Billy Bishop Goes to War, one of the most popular Canadian musicals ever produced for stage. Billy Bishop garnered Gray the 1981 Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award, the Governor General’s Award for drama and the Chalmers Canadian Play Award.

In more recent years, Gray has turned his hand to fiction. Not Quite Dead is Gray’s latest novel, after The Fiend in Human and White Stone Day, both of which were set in Victorian England and followed the adventures of journalist Edmund Whitty who, like a classic Dick Francis protagonist, was continuously abused (by others and himself) in both body and spirit. This time Gray has left Whitty at home to recover from his injuries and has moved the action to the New World, specifically mid 19th-century Baltimore and Philadelphia.

The delight in a Gray novel is found in its gritty, palpable sense of place. This is decidedly not the 1840s as viewed by Hollywood. If it were a movie, it would offer the harsh realities of Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch rather than the glossy Ansel Adams America of countless epic westerns or the broad gestures of Martin Scorsese’s spectacle, Gangs of New York, which takes place in a similar period. In Gray’s novel, the reader can smell the acrid smoke of locomotives in the air and feel the slick of chewing tobacco spit sliding underfoot, can see the hookers with bad skin and the one-eyed Irish hooligan who has brought his Old World battles with him to America.

During this period, Baltimore and Philadelphia were the squalid, suppurating, cacophonous, energetic, chaotic Calcuttas of America. The former also happened to be the haunt of Edgar Allen Poe and the latter the final American stop on a tour by Charles Dickens. Bringing these two famous authors together into an ultimate consubstantiation takes up much of the book. The plot is a bit of a tornado ringing in a spittoon, but like any good theatre man, Gray has made its set pieces and dialogue the heart of this novel.

The language is terrific. Listen:

And:

Part of the story is contained in the diary of one Dr. William Chivers, boyhood friend and dupe of Poe. Poe would like Chivers to help him fake his own death. This, of course, entails stealing a dead body from the morgue in the hospital where the gullible doctor works, allowing Gray the opportunity to indulge in some delightfully morbid descriptions while echoing what might happen in one of Poe’s own dreadful (in its original sense) tales.

Chivers is the sort of character who romanticizes about committing suicide but is literally too lazy to put his thought into action. Poe, on the other hand, is driven and manic (and quite capable of suicide), and the credulous doctor is easy prey for him. Poe is also paranoid and believes the Irish mob is after him. Eventually Poe convinces Chivers to sign the death warrant for him and bury another body in his place.

Meanwhile, an Irish Fenian with a gift of the blarney, Finn Devlin, is travelling about the eastern United States speaking to crowds of like-minded Irish about the horror of their position as “white niggers” and the unjust power of British-born Americans (and collecting healthy donations from the rabble after each harangue). Devlin is connected to bloodthirsty Irish gangs that are up to no good. Finally, Devlin murders Mr. Topham, Dickens’s American publisher, in his grand home, his body parts scattered about the drawing room (lovingly described), forever out of touch with each other, like separate phrases in a poorly constructed sentence.

Inspector Shadduck arrives to a thorough description by Gray of Philly’s early police force, which consists of little more than thugs hired when needed. Like all the characters in this novel, Shadduck is utterly believable and leaps alive off the page. A former military man in a long duster, he is trying his best to think his way through the maze of possibilities presented to him. The reader is pulling for him because he represents the forces of order, although he is little more than the iron fist employed by the law and order element among the local politicians. Yet Shadduck appears to have a mind of his own: he is the good, tough, incorruptible cop in a sea of slime.

Then the famous Charles Dickens arrives in town and the Irish mob, run by a one-eyed goon, has its well-placed kidnap victim, who will be held for a significant ransom. The goon is particularly ghoulish in that he has only a hole remaining where his good eye once roamed and he is devilishly skilled at maiming his opponents with his shillelagh and a long and gruesome fingernail. Gray takes the opportunity to present an extended fight scene in a saloon between one-eyed’s mob of Catholics and a gang of Orangemen, extending the blood and gore, and the list of rich insults, for pages. Gray also reveals an acutely droll sense of humour:

Further humour is found in the definitions (Life, Grave, Repentance, etc.) quoted from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary that headline many chapters. (“History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, brought about by knaves, and fools.”) These display the same compressed intelligence and jaundiced views common to the aphorisms of Oscar Wilde.

Despite some needless complexity, this is a highly recommended literary thriller that can be read for its vital, fully human characters, its fluid dialogue, its thoroughly researched world of 19th-century America, its play with the language, its humour, its irony. Like the works of Poe and Dickens, Gray’s novel presents a fairly dark view of humanity and yet it never becomes ponderous or preachy. What the theatre-goer has lost, for the time being, the reader of novels has gained.