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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
"The shadow world of the imagination...as deep as hell.", 10 Aug 2003
The streets of Edinburgh in 1886 run with blood as a series of bizarre deaths and dismemberments, possibly by some huge wild animal, haunt the public imagination and send the police force into high dudgeon. A frail young woman, Evelyn Todd, is thought to be at the root of these horrifying crimes. Evelyn grew up in an institution in the mid-1860's, where the administrator reined in her imagination and punished her especially for the stories about a lamplighter, with which she entertained the other children. An 1886, Evelyn, now in her twenties, comes under investigation for a series of murders. Evelyn has had vivid and revelatory dreams about each of the murders, though she insists that she has not been present; has no real, firsthand knowledge of any of the murders; and does not know about them ahead of time. The murdered men are all members of a secret society, the Mirror Society, whose membership also includes James Ainslie, Evelyn's "father." Of the murders, Evelyn says only that she believes them to have been committed by "the lamplighter." In an unusual narrative twist to this Gothic and atmospheric novel, O'Neill employs two sets of characters to track Evelyn and ascertain her relationship to these murders. Carus Groves and his assistant, Pringle, are trying to solve the police cases involving the law and its penalties, while Professor Thomas McKnight, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and his friend Canavan are trying to solve the larger questions of who Evelyn really is, why she is able to see details of the crimes in her dreams, and whether she may represent the "devil inherent in all of us. A primeval instinct, a fundamental component of evolution." Eventually, McKnight and Canavan follow Evelyn into Hades in an effort to rescue her from the devil they believe resides within her, and the reader is drawn into a metaphysical and theological debate regarding the nature of selfhood, the existence of evil, its connection both to the imagination and reality, and the extent to which mankind exercises free will in the desire to control outcomes. O'Neill uses the vocabulary of religion and the new perceptions which resulted from Darwin's Origin of the Species to try to explain those aspects of human nature which Freud and the psychoanalysts later developed into a new science at the turn of the century. O'Neill is a fine writer whose use of vivid verbs and lively description helps to animate this serious philosophical debate. The reader's job is figure out what is real and what is not, a task which is not as easy as it may seem in this complex and serious novel. Mary Whipple
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