The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

Today we're told the "world's most interesting man" is a grizzled old guy who drinks Dos Equis. But there was a most interesting man in the world, and his name was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, an explorer, linguist, and adventurer who lived during the Victorian era. Among his many exploits, he searched for the source of the Nile, translated the Kama Sutra into English, and masqueraded as a Muslim and made a hajj to Mecca.

He makes a natural subject for historical fiction, and is well served by Mark Hodder in his debut novel, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack. Hodder also makes use of several other real people from the era, notably the decadent poet Algernon Swinburne, who tags along as Robin to Burton's Batman. This novel is the first in a series featuring the two of them.

The book is set in 1861, and bit by bit the reader realizes something is amiss. At first it was the railroads run by pneumatic tubes, then parakeets that were trained to give messages (but could not be stopped from including vulgar insults as part of the messages). Then we really know we're in alternate history when we learn, in 1840, that Queen Victoria was assassinated and Albert is king.

I immediately suspected time travel, and I don't think I'm spoiling too much to say that will play an element here. I've been reading a lot of books lately that feature time travel--it's perhaps man's greatest unfulfilled wish--but Hodder does utilize more than that convenient plot device here. He creates a world, in London, that feels right, but just a bit askew: "The usual hustle and bustle had returned to the streets of London: the rattling velocipedes, gasping steam-horses, old-fashioned horse-drawn vehicles, pantechnicons, and, above all, the seething mass of humanity."

Technology is way ahead of itself, so there are coal-powered velocipedes (which makes the London air even more toxic) flying "rotochairs," and, in a nod to The Island of Dr. Moreau, eugenicists have not only made parakeets that respond to verbal commands, but have made hybrids of humans and animals. By the end of the book there is an orangutan with a man's brain, which only made me think of Dr. Zeus.

The plot has Burton hired by Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, to solve some attacks by a mysterious figure called Spring-Heeled Jack. He was an actual bogeyman of English folklore, but Hodder makes him quite more vivid: "The steam parted and from it sprang a bizarre apparition: a massively long-legged shape--like a carnival stilt-walker--a long, dark cloak flapping from its hunched shoulders, bolts of lightning crackling around its body and head."

By the time Burton and Swinburne get to the bottom of it (Swinburne poses as a chimney sweep, and enjoys his beatings) such luminaries from the period as Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, and Oscar Wilde, as well as lesser-known (to me) like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Francis Galton, and Laurence Oliphant make appearances (Nightingale, if alive, would certainly sue for character assassination). Hodder keeps upping the stakes, as the novel gets ever increasingly bizarre, but not so much that I wanted to throw the book across the room (if a talking orangutan doesn't do it, I suppose nothing would).

At times Hodder's prose is breathless: "One slip and he could end up in the river!" but I attribute this less to amateur writing skills than his affection for the penny dreadful, the pulp fiction of the Victorian era.