The Cunning House
1810: Jane Austen has just left Bath for Chawton; Sense and Sensibility is to be published the following year. Turley, though, plunges us into a very different England. London is vile and dangerous. A movement to cleanse the city of immorality starting, apparently, with the homosexuals, sees Mollies regularly hanged in public. But a raid on a male brothel throws up links to St James’s Palace, and there are those who will go to any lengths to cover up suggestions of impropriety by the Royal Family.
Turley is a poet, and he writes powerfully (although with a tendency to prolixity), summoning up images of filth, depravity, and horror in a plot of Byzantine complexity. Our central figure, the lawyer Wyre, is soon hopelessly out of his depth, as was this reader. Never mind; mysteries as complex as this are not, I think, necessarily supposed to be understood. There are regular murders, assaults, and double-dealing. A villainous giant, a beautiful, but mysterious, woman, mad doctors (in both senses of the word), Frankenstein-like experiments with electricity and genitalia – this book has it all. It has its fair share of historical inaccuracies, too. The Greenjackets are a regiment, not a title given to sharpshooters generally; it’s possible that someone might throw a beggar five pennies, but when they throw him fivepence I can’t help but feel that we’ve pre-empted decimal currency by a century and a half. Such inattention to detail picks away at the credibility of the plot, which was hanging onto any sense of reality by a fingernail to start off with.
The overblown language can be off-putting, but if you’re happy to suspend disbelief for a while and not worry too much about the plot details, it grows on you. And it’s a useful antidote to Jane Austen.
