Kept

D. J. Taylor's Kept: A Victorian Mystery has a more ambitious agenda, plot-wise, than many of the more conventional neo-Victorian novels: it's both a genuine multiplot novel and a reflection on that form.  Most obviously and openly indebted to Collins, Dickens, and Thackeray, Kept tracks what appear to be two unconnected crimes. First, when Henry Ireland dies after a fall from his horse (or was he murdered?), his insane wife winds up in the keeping of Mr. Dixey, a gloomy old and debt-ridden bachelor whose ancestral home, Easton Hall, is rotting at the seams. And then, there's an amazing train robbery, pulled off by the underhanded Mr. Pardew and his various accomplices.  Everything is wrapped up at the end--or, at least, is sort of wrapped up at the end--by the doughty Captain McTurk.

Sooner or later, historical novelists have to face up to the problem of entwining fictional characters with historical figures.  Kept cleverly exposes the workings of this genre convention by sitting its real Victorians--George Eliot, W. M. Thackeray, Lewis Dunbar--next to fictional characters who are themselves apparently "related" to other fictional characters.  The alert reader quickly picks up on names like Bounderby, Carstairs, Crawley, Harker, Marjoribanks, and the like.  Similarly, Taylor cheerfully trespasses on other novelists' territories, as when Hiram's Hospital suddenly crops up in conversation.  The novel's landscape owes much to Victorian representations of London, as well as to more general Gothic conventions.   And both the plot elements and various character tics should ring distant bells for many readers, ranging from Mr. Dixey's pet mouse (vague hints of Collins' Count Fosco) to the Mrs. Ireland plot (shades of Charles Reade, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charlotte Bronte; in the notes, Taylor also points out Thackeray's wife).  Captain McTurk, who crops up to tie everything together, is himself a close cousin of Collins' Sergeant Cuff and Dickens' Inspector Bucket.  Even the narrator's voice sounds suspiciously like Dickens', or perhaps Thackeray's on a moderately less cynical day than usual.  The novel's world hovers in an in-between space, not so much historical as literary-historical.

As I said, the novel pays homage to the Victorian multiplot novel, but primarily by way of dismantling its assumptions.  As practiced by Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Trollope, among others, the multiplot novel creates the illusion of social totality: as stories interlace, characters of wildly different class, religious, gender, professional, and other backgrounds find themselves mutually implicated in each other's purportedly separate narratives.  Like Collins in particular, Taylor further embodies this many-in-oneness by working several voices into the text, utilizing a narrator, diary entries, letters, newspaper reports, journal articles, and the occasional first-person speaker.  Although Taylor's plot follows a roughly linear path, though, his voices frequently speak "out of turn."  More notably, Kept has no moment equivalent to such revelations as the Ladislaw-Bulstrode or Lady Dedlock-Esther Summerson connections.  Instead, Captain McTurk is the transparent plot device who yokes the two plots together: "Captain McTurk, to whom the coins had come in advance, placed them on a table before him together with Mr. Ireland's watch and began to wonder, as he could hardly fail to do, whether the two might not have some very singular connection" (372).  McTurk could "hardly fail to do" because he's a contrivance.  The characters themselves are rarely any use in this sense, since even the ones who do function in both plots (Esther the maid, Dewar the unwilling accomplice) are never more than partially aware of the fact.  Moreover, the narrative conspicuously fails to wrap up its loose ends.  At least one mystery goes unrevealed; Mr. Pardew is never arrested; one criminal dies and another becomes too ill to be prosecuted; Esther apparently disappears (although she then reappears); Mrs. Ireland never regains her sanity.  McTurk, the conduit through which the strands of the narrative come together, cannot hold it together.  The novel's ending itself unravels.  Purportedly summing everything up, the narrator tells us that "[o]f Esther I know nothing at all" (436), then, just a few pages later, reveals her whereabouts.    In a  manner uncomfortably reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the novel "ends," then keeps going--so that the final word rests with Appendix II, which contains the confession of the transported man who murdered Henry Ireland.  By which time, Henry Ireland's murder has become the least important thing of all.