Book Club Reading Roundup: Adventures in the Late 1800s

San Francisco’s California Street, 1880s. The hill is Nob Hill, with the brick tower of Old St. Mary’s Church prominently visible. Photo from the San Francisco Public Library.

My book club’s two most recent selections were both new-ish novels that take place in the late 19th century: Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent and Brian Doyle’s The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World. Though the books otherwise involve quite different locations, themes, and storytelling techniques, it’s interesting that they both touch on the late-1800s obsession with the natural sciences. Cora, in The Essex Serpent, is a fossil hunter, and Adventures of John Carson features a cameo appearance from Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Here we have an award-winning novel that includes illicit sex, criminal violence, mass hysteria, and rumors of a mythical beast terrorizing a seaside village—and my overall reaction to it is a disappointed shrug. None of those potentially exciting plot elements land with the impact they ought to have, and I’m left wondering what the point of it all was. The New York Times’ admiring review says “It’s been a while since I’ve read a book in which a man and a woman quarrel quite so much, and quite so forcefully, without something devastating coming of it,” but I think that’s exactly the problem. I wanted some devastation; I wanted higher stakes.

I did enjoy the sections that had to do with Francis, the heroine’s 10-year-old son. In the modern era, this boy would surely be diagnosed as autistic, but in 1893 there are no labels for his condition. This is a character and situation I don’t think I’ve encountered in historical fiction before—as opposed to the unconventionally charismatic heroine or the troubled clergyman or his saintly-but-sickly wife—and I’d happily read a whole book about Francis.

But so much of what The Essex Serpent does has already been done better by other writers. Want a genuine Victorian story featuring a progressive minister, talk of how socialism can improve the lives of London’s poor, and a love triangle? Read or watch Shaw’s Candida . Want a neo-Victorian clandestine romance with a deep connection to English landscape and folklore? Read A.S. Byatt’s Possession . Or maybe a neo-Victorian novel that’s loaded with gothic atmosphere and isn’t so damn coy about same-sex attraction? Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith is for you.

Within the world of the novel, the rumors about the Essex Serpent turn out to be more impressive than the truth of it. And that’s how I feel here in our world about The Essex Serpent itself. I was enticed by the very positive buzz around this book (and the upcoming TV adaptation), but it’s much less impressive than I thought it would be, and it lacks true vitality.

The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson by Brian Doyle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Robert Louis Stevenson passed the winter of 1879-1880 in a San Francisco boardinghouse, writing prolifically and looking forward to marrying his beloved Fanny Osbourne after her divorce was finalized. In Adventures of John Carson, Brian Doyle, a longtime Stevenson fanboy, envisions Stevenson spending many of those winter evenings by the fire, listening to his landlady’s husband recount tales from the decades he spent as a seafarer.

I haven’t actually read Stevenson’s most famous novels Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , but of course I’m familiar with their presence in pop culture—and I’d wager that their popularity might have to do with how well they portray villainy and evil. John Carson, however, has plenty of heroes and no villains (except perhaps Fanny’s ex-husband, but he’s not very present in the story). As other Goodreads reviewers have pointed out, it feels like every character is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Stevenson/Doyle even hangs a lampshade on this tendency toward the end of the book (“Are we to read all the way though these pages and find nothing but the brave and courteous Mr. Carson, and the gentle and remarkable Mrs. Carson, and the idyllic Fanny Osbourne across the bay, and her young and callow lover, all of them with good manners and the best intentions? Have we no evil and illness with which to contend?”), but it feels like protesting too much.

There’s also a weird inconsistency at the heart of the book. John and Mary Carson are initially portrayed as though they are a long-married couple and long-established in their cozy San Francisco boardinghouse, but later on, we discover that they got married and moved to SF only 6 months before Stevenson met them. Learning about their love story therefore feels confusing instead of satisfying.

The writing style, full of semicolons and long “riverine” sentences, does feel genuinely nineteenth-century, as does Doyle/Stevenson’s worldview. He talks about virtue and moral character in an openhearted, old-fashioned way; the book is a paean to courage, friendship, and non-toxic masculinity. There are also some wonderful passages describing San Francisco’s landscape and culture.

This is Doyle’s last book, and he wrote it while dying of brain cancer, which helps to forgive some of its “flaws”. When you realize that Doyle wanted to spend his last years writing in praise of good food, good friends, and good stories, devoid of real conflict or sorrow, the book gains a new poignancy. So do Stevenson’s frequent references to his poor constitution and ill health. It may not be my favorite kind of book to read, but I cannot fault a dying man for leaving us a last testament of kindness and grace—and impressively evoking 19th-century style along the way.