The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack [Pyr, 2010]

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Burton & Swinburne #1)

by

Mark Hodder

My rating: 2 of 5

This book was a glorious and magnificent disappointment.

And no, that is not meant to be a strange description, it was literally the only way I could explain my feelings about this book in one short line.

In this book, we are following the first adventure together of the very real Richard Burton who was a famous explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman and his friend Algnernon Swinburne, a Rake, poet, masochist and fan of the Marquis de Sade. Unlike the actual history of our world, in this story, history is skewed and the Victorian era England we know is a twisted, chaotic, steampunk wonderland covered in dirt and grime and soot and of course, possessed of a horrid underbelly. There are new factions that exist like Technologists, Eugenicists and the Rakes and such are of a different calibre than the ones we know of – all leading to a techno, mutation filled, house of madness. There are genetically modified animals used for all kinds of tasks and funky machines like a “rotochair” (helicopter-chair), amongst others. Truth be told, there were moments I felt like this was some kind of Flintstones inspired steam-punk saga.

Anyway, the short version of the setup is that Burton has been maligned and vilified but then he comes face to face with the titular Jack and a series of events leads to him being secretly recruited amidst the scandal to be an agent of The Crown to resolve peculiar happenings in jolly olde England – not just would-be-molestor of young ladies, but also some kind of werewolf gang abducting kids and likely more. He ends up recruiting a few allies, including his Rakish, hard drinking friend Swinburne who is dying to know what dying and therefore real living is like because otherwise how will he ever be a real poet? There’s a newsboy named Quips (who we are informed is young Oscar Wilde) and many characters that are both known and unknown to me that draw from real history – like Florence Nightingale and Charles Darwin with whom I am familiar.

The story is not slow beyond the first couple of setup chapters and once Burton is properly in his new role, it moves well enough. The effort made by Hodder to build his world of “Albertian England” is clearly one of the strongest aspects of the whole effort, as is the story within a story at very specific points where the narrative shifts focus to tell us the tale of what is really happening with Spring Heeled Jack. Unfortunately the rest of it felt like a needlessly long and meandering journey with characters that are not overly well defined to begin with and don’t really seem to get redefined much even toward the end – some, but not much. There is also some amusement to be had with the reimagining of the familiar figures as noted above, but honestly it was pulpy at best and not even great pulp. It was okay and I almost felt like this was something I could visualise as a slightly over-the-top and cheesy story from the black and white era of movies with no subtlety. A good time but not much more.

The sad part is that the book is full of many creative ideas but it is like the ideas are inmates who are running the asylum and there’s not much else to keep me interested. Dialogues are not striking anywhere that I can really remember, there are moments that feel like it was meant to come across as very clever or witty or something but for me it didn’t really land. There was genuinely a point at approximately the halfway mark where I started to accelerate my reading speed and was moving from reading to skimming because I was finding my interest and attention waning hard. I am glad that I didn’t abandon it because there are good moments and things and the finale, which felt a bit rushed like a hurriedly wrapped up action-heavy extravaganza, was a bombastic and daftly entertaining good time that would not be out of place in a modern day big budget movie that wants to look cool and make lots of money.

In the end, the book it was like watching an early industrial attempt at flying a plane that sputtered, chugged on and had briefly exciting moments where it majestically soared for a few moments between disappointing bounces and you were almost sure it could take off into the wild blue yonder… until it turned into a steampunk transformer robot mid-bounce and then slammed head first into a stone wall, exploded into fireworks and then crashed and burned in a heap that I could probably warm my hands and roast marshmallows on… leaving me uncertain if I should be sad or applaud; but mostly glad it was over.


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