Readers may recall that Michael Sadleir’s Forlorn Sunset was the mystery read on my recent bloggy holiday. That is to say that I dragged it from London to Beirut and from Beirut to Paris, in a suitcase that was already dangerously close to its weight limit, despite not knowing one single thing about it. As you can see from the picture, it doesn’t even have a front cover to give a hint. Inside the cover, there sits a rather suggestive ink and wash drawing by John Piper. I say “suggestive” because John Piper was an eminent artist of the mid 20th century, and so I wonder whether this book was rather better known when it was first published in 1947. It certainly can hardy be less well known that it is today. I have searched far and wide and can find only the briefest of mentions in the most obscure of sources. There isn’t even a consensus on how to spell the guy’s name: some, including the excellent art historian and biographer Frances Spalding, go in for “Sadler”, but my copy of the book definitely says “Sadleir”.Oh well. That’s enough wallowing in obscurity. Now for why it is probably one of the best books you have never heard of. This is a novel of the Victorian underworld. It is a gallop through London, but not a London that most Londoners would recognise. This is an organised-crime riddled, iniquitous den awash with the most awful examples of lives wasted and cruelly exploited.
The story knits together the fates of a group of disparate people, high and low, rich and poor, kind and wicked, who are connected by the chance rescue of a child from a mysterious house of abuse in the 1860s. That child is Lottie Heape and it is she, as much as anyone, who forms the centre of this novel. Tangled up in her life there are Vicars and pimps, journalists and soaks, industrialists and pornographers, social reformers and campaigning ladies, brave boys and more than enough nasty pieces of work.
I feel that I should explain the title of this post. Forlorn Sunset is like Charles Dickens because it is a “cast-of-thousands” “portrait-of-a-city” sort of novel. Every character has a history, and what a history that it. I was reminded also of Sarah Waters because Sadleir looks under the carpet of his chosen society – into areas neglected by history. Daniel Defoe gets a mention because there is more than a passing resemblance between his famous lady of the night Moll Flanders (as Nicola Lacey has written “my kind of heroine”) and Lottie Heape. I have mentioned Dan Brown, not because I want to put you off, but because here we have a fast paced muddle to work out with a cliff hanger at the end of every chapter.
This is a cracking story of sin and redemption. It addresses, in a story which never drags and never feels slow, the idea of social evil and individual evil. Sadleir shows in the
panorama of his story how hard it is for a person to fight against the circumstances of their birth and how when a society is rotten to the core, it can pull all sorts of unlikely people within the ambit of its rot.If you are thinking that it sounds a bit gloomy then fear not. For in this book is a clarion call for personal bravery in the face of social convention and what can I say but “hurrah” to that.
Michael Sadleir is also the author of a book entitled Fanny by Gaslight, but don’t let that put you off.