If Children of Men were a book, it would be Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger. What the two share is not their subject matters but, rather, the astonishing technical skill of their creators. Just as the camera in Children of Men seemed a living thing, moving at will and without impediment through the most violent chaos, so the omniscient narrator of The Dress Lodger glides effortlessly from scene to scene, at one point within a character's head, at another point merely observing from a distance. And more, as well: the narrator broods; it chides; it reflects; it speculates; and, in a memorable finish, it launches into a flight of fancy that brings to a satisfying close the novel's cycle of pain, obsession, and redemption.

The setting for The Dress Lodger is Victorian England, about which a single paramount truth obtained: it sucked to be poor. (See also The Quincunx; any book by Charles Dickens.) Gustine, a young teenage girl, makes pots during the day, but every evening she dons a gorgeous blue dress and hustles her body among the middle and upper classes. (The dress, which she wears at the insistence of her pimp, increases the rates she can charge.) But Gustine is also a mother, and to treat her child's disease -- which the novel reveals, suddenly, in a moment of awful brilliance -- she solicits the aid of Dr. Henry Chivers, who in return asks Gustine to help him procure corpses for his anatomy studies. Fortunately, corpses are in ready supply: an epidemic of cholera morbus has broken out, and soon it will sweep within its maw the deserving and undeserving alike.

In The Dress Lodger, Holman has evoked in impressive and absorbing detail the minutiae of Victorian England. (You can read the first chapter online; in its richness and masterful control of narration it serves as an adequate representative of the rest of the book.) Holman has a knack for the telling observation: the stench of disinfectants, the itch of a festering illness, the leaden weight of wet clay and dead bodies. If you can't already tell, she also has a taste for the macabre -- or, at least, the unsettling. The unique syndrome of Gustine's child is the most obvious example of the book's morbid tone, although I could also mention the plague of frogs and an old woman called the Eye, who serves as Gustine's tragic, silent doppelganger. Seldom has a time and place so tawdry and grotesque been so compellingly described.

The story, too, despite its relative compactness, is narratively rich. For most of the book, the various characters pursue their own goals, in ignorance or disregard of others. As a result Holman treats us at first to a series of conflicts and concerns that, though each is limited in scope to a single person, nevertheless establish a clear sense of the minor dramas that fully occupy most people's lives. Gustine obsesses over her child; Dr. Chivers frets over his reputation and future; and Dr. Chivers's wife, perhaps the purest soul in the book, worries about her father's ship even as she discovers a new moral purpose. As the novel progresses, these individual concerns begin to merge, driven inexorably together by the plague and by the characters' increasingly stubborn attempts to fulfill their own lives. It is not a simple story, but Holman (or, rather, her disembodied narrator) tells it clearly and effectively.

There is a risk, I suppose, that The Dress Lodger's technical brilliance masks some deeper defect in the book that, as a consequence, is not readily apparent. But the same could be said of any masterfully constructed work of art, and the contention is no more meaningful here. Would the story, abstracted from its telling, be less compelling? Would the characters be less interesting? The answer, of course, is yes. But Holman's unique narration transforms what would otherwise be a historical melodrama into a powerful reflection on the grip of obsession and the strength of the human heart, in all of its forms.

Copyright © 2006 Steven Wu