The Wicked Boy – Kate Summerscale

The boy in this Victorian true-crime story is thirteen year old Robert Coombes. For over a week in July 1895, with his father away at sea, he and his younger brother, Nathaniel, maintained the fiction that their mother was away visiting relatives. But as they pawned family valuables, visited the test match at Lords cricket ground, and played cards with a simple-minded family friend the smell from the upstairs bedroom was getting worse and worse.

Kate Summerscale takes the reader steadily through the fateful week and then through the discovery and investigation of the murder (for such it is), and the trial and punishment of the perpetrator, combining a forensic approach to the detail of the case with a rich contextual analysis of the social history of the period in London’s East End.

The title should maybe have a question mark appended as Summerscale weighs the evidence on the boy’s actions – wicked by nature or by the circumstances of his upbringing and environment. And the story continues well after 1895 and far beyond London as surprising new evidence comes to light on Robert Coombes’ later life.

The writing sucks in the reader, hungry for detail and resolution yet happy enough to be taken off at interesting tangents that never outstay their welcome. A fascinating and enthralling read that engenders wonder at Kate Summerscale’s depth of research, so lightly worn.

The Visible World – Mark Slouka

This novel, and it does purport to be a novel, is in three sections: ‘Memoir’, ‘Intermezzo’ and ‘Novel’.

In the memoir the narrator tells episodically of his childhood growing up in 1950’s America, the son of Czech parents. The comings and goings of other émigrés, the stories told, the chat overheard, and secrets eavesdropped indicate a family history of drama, romance, tragedy and an aftermath that still echoes down the years into his own life.

In the intermezzo he travels to Prague to investigate wartime events. The details of Czech history, the facts, are in the national record to be uncovered, but unravelling the part in them played by his parents defies his efforts.

Not to worry, the novel section re-imagines it all anyway. In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1942 there is the palm-sweatingly tense drama of the resistance struggle; romance, bitter-sweet enough to tug the heartstrings; tragedy, inevitable but in an unexpected way and all the worse for that; and an aftermath, articulated with more difficulty but still thought-provoking.

It is reasonably well written, particularly the third, novel, section that in truth could stand alone.  Is the preceding memoir Slouka’s own? The dedication references his parents ‘who lived the years and half the story’ but the standard disclaimer says it is all fiction.