The London Satyr [Hardcover]

I found this the most successful of the six Edric novels I have attempted - two of which I abandoned, but I keep returning to his work for the clear, striking prose - excellent in creating atmosphere and describing scenes - and his concern with people's motivations and relationships.

The theme is an intriguing one - moral corruption beneath a layer of respectability in 1890s London. The topic has not yet been done to death, although covered by the recently televised "The Crimson Petal and the White", an overblown rose next to this much shorter, more narrowly focussed work.

Webster is a photographer employed by the Lyceum Theatre under its flamboyant actor-manager Irving and his control-freak sidekick, Stoker. Webster has drifted into a financial arrangement with Marlow, "the London satyr", the suave pornographer who needs him to "lend" theatrical costumes for use in sleazy photo sessions. Webster is an enigmatic man. Perhaps he likes the secrecy, the risk of detection, the fact of not being quite what he seems. Perhaps he feels his own guilt is minimal, since he is merely a supplier, an observer of a seedy but intriguing world, without knowing exactly what is going on. The murder of a child prostitute by a man in Marlow's circle sets up a criminal investigation which forces Webster to think about whether and how to protect himself.

The fact that Webster often seems weak and passive make him a less attractive character. Why doesn't he stand up to his greedy, manipulative daughter or over-familiar, cunning maidservant? Yet some of the most moving passages in the book provide the explanation for his apathy and for his loss of connection with his wife Alice, for both have been devastated by the premature death of their younger daughter.

Edric also harnesses the late Victorian obsession with the spirit world. Grief has led Alice to set herself up as a medium. Webster's scepticism is a further barrier between them, but he plays along, even supplying information that will help her act out convincing contacts with the spirit world. He makes no attempt to step in, even when it becomes clear that her main motivation is the morbid delusion that dead souls are speaking to her through her deceased child.

At first, I found the lengthy dialogues entertaining, but soon began to feel that they are too much of a substitute for real action. The continual game-playing, with characters not meaning what they say, or saying what they mean, begin to seem contrived. Some scenes appear wooden and clunky, perhaps because the author has laboured over the words at the expense of the narrative drive. Also, too many of the characters - be they a Jewish immigrant, a female procurer or a servant - speak in the same subtly ironic "voice" and very articulate phrases as the educated middle-class characters.

I felt for a while that the plot is too slight to sustain the book. In fact, it manages to work up to a kind of climax. The inconclusive ending - the story simply stops - disappointed me at first, but then seemed to be quite reasonable. Edric has made his point, and leaves you to draw your own conclusions about how Webster goes on to live out his life.

The London Satyr is set in London in the late 19th century, narrated by Charles Webster. Webster is a photographer at the Lyceum Theatre but who also has a risky sideline in supplying theatrical costumes for use in the pornographic industry of the day. The story is basically about Webster trying to appease the difficult people in his life at the same time as avoiding the tightening noose in the shape of the London Vigilance Committee.

Which is not a lot when it is spread over 367 pages. I actually found this book not only boring, but frustrating as well. Webster is wet, without any kind of gumption or backbone. He is bullied by everyone around him, from his psychic wife and angry daughter to his colleagues at the theatre and the seedy porn-king Marlow. But we don't see a spark of indignation or resolve, just more hang-dog gloom and defeatism. The small set of characters around him are quite bland - I never quite understood Webster's love for porn-queen Pearl, and I could never really tell the various people at the theatre apart.

Bizarrely,there is a bit of real history woven in to the story. The writer Bram Stoker was actually the manager of the Lyceum Theatre and the personal assistant to the celebrated actor Henry Irving, both of which are featured as Webster's employers in the book. Maybe it's a homage to Stoker and Irving, but I rather doubt they would appreciate the mention, seeing as it is implied that they are both somehow involved in London's underground world of pornography.

Another thing which I struggled with is that the readers loyalties are never properly placed - Are Marlow and his accomplices enemies of society, perpetuating the perverse habits of its weakest members or are they a brave underground movement against the restrictive, overly-puritanical Victorian London? Perhaps Edric intentionally left the readers to make up their own minds, but that would make this book a commentary on society. Seeing as it is very much a macabre suspense novel set in the past, it's more likely that the author has simply failed to make up his own mind on the matter, leaving the reader in a bit of a hopeless limbo.

But the biggest source of frustration is the dialogue. It is consistently diffuse, mysterious and artificial. There are too many hints, meaningful looks, mysterious suggestions, hidden meanings, loaded pauses, implied accusations and interrupted musings when a simple conversation would have served its purpose much more powerfully. Sentences are finished with a hand gesture or a raised eyebrow. Or something strange is said, and then translated to the reader through Webster's internal narration. Everything is implied and nothing is said outright. It is a constant, frustrating and unnecessary ritual which bears no resemblance to how people really communicate. A little bit of this can be very clever. But a whole book of people saying one thing but meaning something slightly different makes for a really irritating book.

In a recent article in The Guardian, author Michel Faber defended the Victorians against the 20th century charge of hypocrisy. He argued that they inherited many of their problems, and then addressed them with energy, but that those problems still remained with us. I was reminded of Faber's argument by this book. Of course Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White shares some of the themes of this book, concerned as it is, in part, with the seamier side of Victorian London. I think though that "Crimson Petal" is more of an epic, extending over a greater length of time while "Satyr" is much more focussed. Also, Faber's book is, perhaps about a central character (Sugar) who escapes from a world of vice (although the ending is ambiguous) while here we have Charles Webster, photographer, being drawn in by the hypnotic master pornographer Marlow.

Webster works on the staff of the Lyceum theatre, presided over by Sir Henry Irving, one of the great lights of the Victorian theatre though (by the time this book is set) something of a dimming light. The theatre is managed by one Bram Stoker, presented as something of a stickler for detail and constantly about to expose Webster (at least in Webster's view). Because Webster is using the chaos and disorder that Stoker abhors to make a little for himself - diverting costumes that are supposed to go into store to Marlow's studio, where they are used to clothe his models (though not very thoroughly).

Webster seems to flourish in this half world - not properly part of the theatre, profiting from things lost in the gaps, not at ease at home where his wife devotes herself to seances and mediumship, supported by his daughter who plainly loathes him. He slips in and out of Marlow's world, observing, never really driving events but just suffering them, never taking a stand, observing, watching - whether Marlow's "models" at work or his assistant, Pearl, in the street. Webster is in fact a bit of an enigma and perhaps a hard character to spend time with, although as the book progresses and especially in the last thirty pages or so we get some idea perhaps of what has left him so numb and more importantly why - there is a tragic background to this which also drives his wife, Alice, in her spiritualism. But Webster is never sympathetic. For much of the book he - and other associates of Marlow - are trying to escape the consequences of the murder, by an aristocrat, of a child prostitute. While nobody in Webster's immediate circle seems to have been directly responsible, they must all take some of the guilt, yet the main drive is simply for survival, and as the noose tightens their uneasy society withers. It is all rather appalling and chilling.

While perhaps not, in places, for the squeamish, the book conveys I think a pervasive sense of the 19th century as the precursor to our own time (Faber's argument again), with some wonderful vignettes and contrasts - Irving in his pomp as the Great Actor/ manager contrasted with the more relaxed (well, given what goes on there, very relaxed) air of Marlow's studio which seems more like a peep into the 20th century film industry. Or the relentless, noisy construction of a railway line near Webster's house, recalling a time when railways were still (just) noisy, new intrusive things (but isn't that what the residents of the Chilterns think today - the Victorian age is closer than we think!)

Overall, a thought provoking, entertaining book and one that eventually comes back to that question of Victorian hypocrisy, because inevitably the descriptions of what goes on in that studio off Golden Square draw the reader in, inviting comparisons between then and now - the only real difference between 1891 and now being, the book seems to say, the technology available to Marlow and to his modern successors.