Golems and Bed-wetters

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) by Peter Ackroyd: Dan Leno was a real music-hall legend in England during the 1970's and 1880's. The Limehouse Golem is a fictional English serial killer created by Peter Ackroyd for this novel. 

That sort of sums up the balance between the historical and the fictional throughout Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, in which Karl Marx and George Gissing share the stage with fictional protagonist Elizabeth Cree, her husband, and an assortment of fictional police detectives, music-hall performers, and horrifyingly mutilated victims of The Golem.

Peter Ackroyd's many histories and biographies often cross the line between factual and fictional, or at least factual and speculative. This isn't a problem in a historical novel. Ackroyd structures Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem in both narrative and documentary terms. Some chapters follow key characters through third-person narration, sometimes 'panning back' to discuss things in broader historical and narrative terms. Elizabeth Cree narrates some chapters in first-person. Some chapters are the (fictional) court transcripts of Elizabeth's testimony. And some chapters purport to be the diary entries of the Limehouse Golem.

It may seem a bit post-modernist, but it all works together quite smoothly. Karl Marx and George Gissing illuminate some of the odder places and truths of Victorian London, including an early computer, the dance halls, and Gissing's own peculiar life. And in Elizabeth Cree, Ackroyd has created a compelling, unreliable narrator whose life's journey focuses the narrative on the poverty and pleasures of London -- especially the music-hall pleasures.

It's all something of a treat, albeit an often bleak and difficult one (though not as bleak and difficult as Ackroyd's Hawksmoor or The House of Dr. Dee -- compared to them, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is a warm-hearted romp. Be careful where you place your sympathies. And don't be fooled into thinking a baby Charlie Chaplin shows up. He doesn't. Ackroyd is messing with you. Highly recommended.

The Little Gift (2017) by Stephen Volk: Volk eschews the supernatural for the all-too-natural in this melancholy and chilling novella. An extra-marital affair leads to regrets and repercussions for a married man -- but not the sort of regrets and repercussions one might expect. You might call it a story about "Survivor's Relief." And you'd be right. Recommended.

The Bed-wetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee (2010) by Sarah Silverman: Published at what I guess was Peak Silverman, The Bed-wetter takes the reader through the first 40 years of the comedian's life in occasionally hilarious fashion. In the aftermath of the #Me Too movement, Silverman's portrait of the writer's room for The Sarah Silverman Program seems sort of icky, though. There just isn't as much comedy in the idea of men regularly wandering around with their balls out in a public space as there used to be. Lightly recommended.