Suspense, Murder and Mad Love in Victorian London

Victorian in its drizzly London setting and rush of improbable coincidences, “Laura Blundy” will keep readers riveted to its pages, as Julie Myerson layers the suspense in this tale of love and betrayal. At once a thriller, love story and ghost tale, Myerson’s fourth novel defies easy categorization. But the voice of its narrator, Laura Blundy herself, maintains the novel’s haunting unity. The story begins with Laura calmly recounting the murder of her own husband, a surgeon who once amputated her leg and thus saved her life. Laura’s precise, matter-of-fact manner is nothing but unnerving:

“It is not done that quickly. Well, he is a big man--five eleven in his stockinged feet--and I am not a hefty woman. It takes several goes. But I have surprise on my side. He never expects it--he can’t believe it. Neither can I. In the end I use my crutches as well. I don’t stop until he’s down and twitching, till he’s stopped shouting and screaming, till he’s down.”

Laura had not married her husband for love, and she murdered him out of passion for another man. She had accepted Ewan’s clumsy but persistent offers in order to avoid returning to the workhouse or her even grimmer life on the London streets. And for a while, pretty clothes and a fine house sufficed. But when Laura met Billy, a younger fellow with a wife and children of his own who worked building the city’s new sewer system, she fell crazily in love for the first time in her near-40 years.

Myerson intercuts the main narrative with scenes from Laura’s past that help flesh out this beguiling and tormented character, intensifying the novel’s suspense in the process. Orphaned before she turned 15, Laura was left to make her own way in the world and soon became pregnant. She loved her son, but with no way to support the infant, she gave him up to the orphanage, visiting as often as she could. One morning when she went to see him, Laura was told by the clerk that her son had died during the night, and thus began her terrible grief, one that would set in motion the novel’s most bizarre circumstances. Myerson’s portrait of Laura brims with surprises, revealing a woman who manages to keep the core of herself in some way intact despite her many extreme misfortunes.

During one of her meetings with Billy, Laura tries to explain her feelings about the amputation of her leg, the result of an infection after a cab ran her down:

“No, you don’t understand, I insisted, They really took it. They wouldn’t let me see it. Afterwards.

“Why would you want to see it? he asked me dreamily and he tried to take me close to him and arrange the stray wisps of hair that clung around my brow. I pulled away.

“Because it was mine, I said, Don’t you get it, Billy? This was my property, this leg--it belonged to me--

“Billy laughed a little uncertainly.

“What would you have done with it, Laura?

“I would have buried it, I said. I would have put it in the ground. What else do you do with a dead thing?”

Laura’s explanations of her own feelings and motives often reflect this strange but comprehensible logic. She continues unflinching in her self-reflection. During their courting period, when Ewan is marveling at her arrow-sharp directness, Laura tells him that she is able to be so direct because she has nothing left to lose.

Myerson herself remains unflinching throughout her descriptions of the novel’s most horrifying events. Inspired by a reenactment of a Victorian amputation she witnessed in a garret of the St. Thomas Church in Southwark, she describes Laura’s surgery in grisly detail. And yet, the very precision of her language keeps the novel--even in its graphically violent moments--from dissolving into sheer morbidity. Her description of Laura and Billy’s disposal of Ewan’s body teeters on the far edge of the grotesque, yet the calm reflection she grants to Laura rescues the scene:

“I set in, working it with all my muscle back and forth through the hardest part of him. This, I thought, this is what he did to me. I felt quite excited and quite sad for Ewan. With this rare glimpse of his working life, I found I could see the world from his point of view and it was a strange one and no mistake.”

Myerson’s finest accomplishment in the novel arrives from her nuanced portrait of its eerily compelling protagonist. In the end, readers may question whether the tale can contain all the strangeness that it has brought together, yet the journey to its conclusion provides more than enough insight and excitement to get us there.