Read my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies now (in paperback, hardback, or on Kindle)! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.
Review
This is a fun concept, playing with the concept of the tête-bêche book (a single text with two stories printed back-to-back) in meta-fictional fashion; Rubins’ book is a tête-bêche about tête-bêches. The book construction re-emerges periodically (e.g. recent science-fiction and speculative novels) because it offers an extra structural method of playing with recurrences, echoes, and parallel lives. Collections of short fiction often play similarly with tracing stories across discrete narratives (like Ben Shattuck’s wonderful History of Sound). The tête-bêche stories need not, strictly, have anything to do with each other; it’s just a convenient way to structure them.
Rubins’ novel takes us back to a story on the margins of nineteenth-century Britain, in the marshes of the East of England, and pairs it with a mid-century American modern scene, tying the two together through a single family. It explores brotherhood, motherhood, and life both on the margins and in the limelight. When we begin the second story, the first is reframed as the novel within the novel, written by a wealthy American who has apparently committed suicide on the eve of his father’s run for President. The first novel becomes, apparently, a roman à clef, and his sister and a newfound friend must use it to decipher why the author has died.
It brings together an assortment of neo-Victorian Gothic images and tropes: a woman kept in a glass cell; a woman kept hidden away in a nunnery; cases of mistaken identity; a cruel and deranged vicar; a littoral landscape that literally sucks in the guilty and innocent alike. And it combines them with many of the twentieth-century American Gothic horrors: eugenicist ideologies of the ruling classes (we could read this interestingly against Wilkie Collins’ Heart and Science); disposable starlets chewed up by Hollywood; medical mistreatment of unruly wives (again, very relevant to Victorian literature!); gangster politics.
This should, then, be a rollicking ride. But it left me feeling a little cold. Perhaps it was the length; trying to interweave two stories in this way demands slightly more, perhaps, than the length that would suit two distinct stories sewn together as a tête-bêche? Perhaps it was slightly too obvious (given the tropiness) where the chips would fall. Perhaps there was just a bit too little neo-Victorian and a bit too much ‘modern’ American for my personal tastes. But I felt a bit of a lack of pacing or interest in some of the characters in the first half, where my interest should have been most closely captured. I did wonder whether it could have been more interestingly framed the other way round, with story two up first. The roman à clef would have had to have worked differently or been dropped, but it was an idea that kept coming back to me as I read.
I’d be interested to give this a re-read in a little while and see how it settles…. (#NotASpoiler…?)
Read my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies now (in paperback, hardback, or on Kindle)!
Dominique Gracia 
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