London Bridges
by Jane Stevenson
This is a delicious book: clever, erudite, witty, funny, generous . . . silly, and charmingly self-indulgent. All very like Sebastian Raphael, doctor of Classics, perhaps the most central (and perhaps the most charming) of its central characters, whom we see first through the eyes of another important character, Jeanene Malone: ‘ . . . an expansive and zestful individual, not unlike the late Oscar Wilde in appearance. He had longish dark hair, bright blue eyes, and an unEnglish ability to address a shop assistant as if she were a human being rather than a mechanical answering device . . .’ Jeanene is Australian, in London to study ancient Greek, working as a pharmacist. After Sebastian leaves her pharmacy, a couple enter, wanting a prescription filled. They say it is for ‘their uncle’, but the name on the paper is Scottish, as is the address of the doctor who had written it, and the couple are clearly Greek: she hears them arguing in their own language when she comes silently back into the front of the shop: ” ‘Just shut up. Even if we killed him, it wouldn’t matter. Who’s ever going to know?’ ”
London Bridges is a murder mystery, although there’s no mystery. You meet the chief villain in the second chapter, which begins: ‘It is acknowledged by all right-thinking persons that an Old Etonian scratching about for a living is a melancholy sight. One January day . . . Mr Edward Lupset emerged from Holborn tube station in his customary state of rage, frustration and despair. . . . he found his gaze arrested . . . by Hackett’s windows. . . . his reflection returned to him . . . tall, slim, blond, and designed both by nature and nurture to wear such clothes. Fashion victims may be sad, sick people, but a frustrated dandy is a dangerous man.’ And when he finds himself, as the most junior (and most disliked) lawyer at a large firm, lumbered with sorting out the tail end of a several-hundred-year-old bit of business with a Greek firm, business of no use to anyone except a few presumably clueless monks on the holy mountain of Athos, his sense of personal grievance increases even further. But then as he wades through dusty files of ancient correspondence in order simply to understand what the business is, he discovers that it might be a great deal of use indeed–to him. The two Greek lawyers acting in the matter, a man and a woman, are coming to London, and propose to meet with him; and at that meeting the three discover that they are really very like-minded about the situation.
Perhaps the main thing, to me, about London Bridges is that Stevenson has bags of style. I yearn for style, and there seems to me rather little of it about. Of the Great Three of novel-writing, plot, character and style, while I put character first, if a book doesn’t have at least some flash and glint of style I can’t be bothered to read it; nuts and bolts, getting-the-story-told writing bores and irritates me. This, however, makes me laugh: “[Sebastian] was delighted to find George Beckinsale himself in the staff common room . . . George was a man with theories about many things, not excepting ancient Greek government, but among the most persistent, and fervently held, was that Sebastian would be none the worse for a good hanging. . . . He recoiled skittishly as Sebastian came up behind him in a waft of Guerlain, as if he imagined you could catch queerness, like headlice, by contact. ‘Hello, ducky,’ said Sebastian cheerfully. . . .”
Or this scene, near the end, where our motley collection of heroes and heroines is about to catch up with Edward: “Dil['s] eyes were very bright . . . he stood very straight, looking suddenly like a Rajput warrior prince about to give Clive of India hell on a plate. ‘We need the cavalry,’ he said suddenly, and strode purposefully out into the road to flag down the bikers. . . . A tall, thin man in worn leathers . . . pushed up the visor of his battered helmet, and looked them over.
‘Need some help, mate?’ he asked, civilly enough.
‘We need to catch a bent lawyer on a big bike. . . . Can you give us a hand?’
The biker absorbed this statement impassively, and nodded. ‘Who’s coming, then?’ “
London Bridges is also an affectionate, extended salute to Margery Allingham*, who also loved London and the colour and diversity of its population (as another colonial living in England I especially relished some of Jeanene’s outsider’s bewilderment. In one scene Sebastian’s lover Giles offers to take several of them to lunch and a tour of his bit of Gloucestershire: ‘Jeanene looked imploringly at Hattie for guidance. One aspect of English English which still had her confused was sorting out polite insincerities from genuine offers.’ –Yessss**). London itself is a major character (as it was in Allingham’s novels). Dil and Hattie, old friends, go for a stroll together: ‘. . . the Thames was placid, grey, empty, spanned by bridge after bridge: Westminster, Hungerford, Waterloo, shadowed by the concrete Gulag of the National Theatre, Blackfriars. Crows bounced in the spring breezes amid the slicing, economical flight of the ever-present gulls. . . .’ Hattie works for the Bridge Trust: ‘We’re a very old charity . . . if anyone’s trying to get a project off the ground, we offer support . . . we broker information between groups. . . . We’re for London, and our basic question is, is a new project going to make London life better. . . .’ As it happens, Hattie’s latest project is a squatter garden-allotment that has grown up on a piece of waste ground, bombed out during WWII and never redeveloped, possibly because its owners are a few unworldly Greek monks.***
For anyone else who adores classy, literate mysteries where good is a better driver and evil is caught up with, may I warn you about one thing: you know who’s for the chop as soon as you meet him too, just as you know that Edward is going to be the bad guy. Forewarned is forearmed. But he’s a lovely old gentleman, and you’ll probably cry at his funeral, just as Sebastian does. †
* * *
* Jane Stevenson herself has said so: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/19/fiction.shopping1
Any of Stevenson’s essays are worth reading, but in the circumstances I particularly recommend:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jun/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview31
** There’s also a very sweet, understated romance between Dil and Jeanene; the south London native ‘Rajput prince’–as the unspeakable Edward, who is in the same law firm, describes him: ’His father and mother ran an Indian sweet business somewhere in Southall and had laughable curry-flavoured accents, yet he cheerfully admitted to them in public’–and the anglo Australian. Another of this book’s pleasures is Stevenson’s blithe, deft juggling with multi-cultural-ethnic-gender-sexual-proclivities-whatever.
*** And now for the real, true, secret reason I like this book so much, but any of you who read it will collar me immediately: Hattie has a lurcher. She even once refers to her as ‘hellhound’. ‘Alice’s air of injured innocence intensified: could anyone believe . . . that this neglected and suffering animal was capable of slipping into anyone’s kitchen and eating an entire coffee-and-hazelnut gateau and a side of smoked salmon in a minute and a half?’ –Ah ha. My problem with my hellhounds’ indifference to food is obviously that I haven’t tried them on coffee-and-hazelnut and smoked salmon. Can’t be gateau, though, flour being the root of all evil, but I do have a recipe for coffee-and-hazelnut-and-chocolate meringue somewhere.
Humbly I will insert here that I do have a minor caveat about Alice. Yes, you certainly can have a dog in London, and you can take it about with you. But it’s not that easy. Alice does not sound like a small lurcher, and you have to carry–or at least be able to carry–your dog(s) on the tube. I am also appalled at the idea of leaving her outside a restaurant: I’m not (just) paranoid, dog theft is an enormous danger.
† And if we’re talking about homages to Allingham and Albert Campion, as Stevenson does in that essay, I want to know if Stevenson has any plans to turn Raphael and friends into a series. I find Hattie very open-ended, for example, and the feud between Sebastian and the dreadful George has barely begun. Stevenson might not, of course. Or she might want to, and the Story Council hasn’t sent her anything she can use. I would sympathise.
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