This pacy piece of Victorian crime fiction delivers chills galore: pickled babies, wicked surgeons, a head in a hatbox and other unsettling discoveries. “The baby isn’t suckling the mother’s finger, it’s gnawing it,” is a gasped pronouncement made, of course, in a crypt. Yes, this is a sidestep into genre – Jess Kidd’s two previous novels, Himself and The Hoarder, were contemporary and more original – but it is done with panache.
The lead character is Bridget “Bridie” Devine, a pipe-smokin’, crypt-crashin’, child-rescuin’ proto-detective who sometimes dons moustaches and male clothing to gain admission to operating theatres. She spends her long walks across Victorian London thinking, divining (her name needs little unpicking), and chatting with her hallucinations. An attractively independent character, she is always “captain of her own ship”. And she is followed around by an amorous ghost. “I’m not in the market for a haunting,” she tells this deceased boxer, as he approaches her in a churchyard one night. But he soothes her nightmares and gives spiritual cuddles; there’s a touching scene when he is unable to protect her from a beating. It’s a lovely idea, wittily done, and its warmth is a welcome respite from the grisly Victorian police procedural.
Kidd’s research is worn lightly, with occasional real names dropped in for orientation, such as the doctor Elizabeth Garrett or the menagerie owner Jamrach of Ratcliff Highway. But her imagination rides wild, in tightly controlled prose. Her concision makes the book feel like a high-pressure jar, stuffed with frightening specimens including a knife-wielding rogue surgeon. Is there any more chilling phrase for a sham doctor to stutter out than “I wanted to see inside her”?
That most handed-down of tropes, the mermaid, is refreshed here into a merrow, a magical creature who affects the weather and the emotions of all who look on her. If the book is reminiscent of other successes – Killing Eve meets The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock via The Essex Serpent – this is hardly Kidd’s fault: it was no doubt in gestation before these works appeared. Authors can be sensitive to literary fashions in a profound way, on-trend because they inhale and exhale the cultural mood. But ultimately a lot of this feels familiar, even as it strives to be strange, with its supporting cast of liberated circus performers, choreographed ravens and noisy parrots. Still, it is well worth the price of admission.
• Things in Jars is published by Canongate (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
