Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Alienist

I don’t know about your shelves but my shelves of unread books have become clogged with novels I thought I wanted to read five or six years ago and now I can’t remember why I thought I wanted to read them and since I’ve now read all the ones I could remember why I wanted to read them I’m left with this scurvy crew, and there they are, glaring at me and muttering hey, you, get with the program, read me. And some turn on the waterworks and cry out beseechingly ohhh please mister, I’ve been so patient for six years now, I need to be read. I feel like a right bastard but I have to be honest – why are you there? I ask them. Why are you taking up this valuable real estate? I’m talking to you, Continental Drift, Tiger the Lurp Dog, Imaginary Women and Smonk. Smonk?? What the hell is Smonk? But of course they don’t know. No book knows why you buy it. Just like you don’t know why you’re born.

You might think the blurbs on these books could give a clue but blurbs lie. You would have to waterboard a blurb to get anything like the truth out of it but waterboarding is illegal. I have stopped doing that now.

Course I do know why some books are there – these are the Novels I Should Have Read By Now. There they stand sneering at me like undone homework – The Forsyte Saga, Sister Carrie, The Way We Live Now, The Ambassadors, Middlemarch – all big enough to bust up your big toe real bad if they fell on it. Herr, herr, he’s scared of us, they jeer. Yer big Jessie.

I just about remembered why I bought The Alienist years ago – I love modern Victorian novels like Fingersmith or The Quincunx, and I like a nice gruesome murder and I do believe this novel smashes these concepts together so what could therefore not be to like?

I gave it the statutory 100 pages then stopped. It wasn’t bad but I could see where this thing was going and a wave of tiredness came over me. What we have is yet another version of the brilliant Sherlock Holmes (Dr Kreizler) and the tough, dependable Dr Watson (John Moore); plus the usual highly unlikely gaggle of helpers – a giant black guy, two Jewish detectives, a remarkably feisty female police secretary who packs a .45 – really, all from central casting. Should we say, all from Liberal Left Central Casting – once again, all the good guys in the novel have nice progressive inclusive non-racist attitudes. The kind of attitudes modern readers would feel comfortable with, however likely they may have been in New York 1896. And once again our heroes are faced with a giant conspiracy of the powerful who like to prey on the powerless and chop them up for fun.

We have been here before. Many times. Really, it’s a little bit corny. But that’s crime fiction. When I listen to doo wop music or blues I know what I’m going to get. When I read a big 500 page novel I don’t want to know what I’m going to get.

And now…. onto Smonk!