Kept

This novel has been sitting on my shelves for at least two years and I have made several short-lived attempts to read it, only to abandon it almost at once. Anyway, now I have. What to say? This is Victorian pastiche with a vengeance, and extremely well done, I must say.  D.J. Taylor is an academic and clearly knows his 19th century literature like the back of his hand. Large chunks of the novel could easily have been written by Dickens -- the characters, the atmosphere, the descriptions are all very authentic. The plot, too, is certainly ingenious in its use of real people and events interwoven with fictional ones -- running throughout as one of several main themes is the first great train robbery, many of the characters who pop up are based on people who really existed, and genuine documents -- diaries, letters etc -- have a place in the fictional narrative. So far so good. But as for the actual story, or stories, that the novel tells, I thought this aspect of it was a bit disappointing. There are two main plots -- the various schemes of the chief villain, which culminate in the theft of a good deal of gold bullion from a train, and the apparent imprisonment of a young woman who has mental problems -- and in the end there proves to be a rather tenuous link between the two. But quite honestly I found both of them to be rather damp squibs, and neither was particularly satisfactorily resolved. There are numerous sub-plots and secondary characters, some of them quite well-drawn, but often their presence seemed to add nothing to the development of the narrative, and indeed to be there only to allow Taylor to show off his expertise in creating Dickensian types. One character, in fact, is given a whole chapter to himself, in which he is shown to be stranded in the snow in a Canadian wilderness, and which proved to be more or less completely irrelevant to anything else that was going on in the novel -- I skipped most of it, I'm afraid.
It's not often that I am so critical of books on here. But I thought it was a bit of a shame that so much skill had been gone into something which didn't really quite succeed. I know that many people really liked this novel, so perhaps you may be one of them -- don't let me put you off. For me, though, it was a triumph of technique over plot.