I, Ripper

The scene of the crime in Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” murders

I’ll begin this review with a caution—Stephen Hunter’s I, Ripper is thrilling entertainment but not for the faint of heart. Hunter himself noted, at a booksigning at the time of the book’s release in 2015, that he was concerned about the novel’s violence when he submitted the first chapters to his editor. Her response: “Why don’t you move the violence to the front and really start the book off with a bang?”

He did, and it does. Be warned.

Jack the Ripper killed five women—that we are certain of—in the fall of 1888. All of the victims were occasional or professional prostitutes and most of them were alcoholics who spent the money they earned from their johns—thruppence at a time—on gin and, occasionally, one night in a rented bed in a dosshouse. Whitechapel teemed with such as well as recent immigrants from Ireland, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe—the latter of which included lots of Jews, political radicals, and Jewish political radicals, all on the run from Tsarist persecution—and a constantly changing mob of sailors and industrial workers. The district’s dense network of shops and rowhouses and unlighted maze of small streets and alleys hummed with activity even during the night, as workers walked to or from late shifts at slaughterhouses and factories and the docks and upper class types went slumming in the pubs or, perhaps, looking for a “judy.”

From the first page, in which Jack, as yet unnamed but in his own voice—a found diary—cuts the throat of his first victim, Hunter evokes the jungly tumult and grime of this world brilliantly. I, Ripper’s authentic atmosphere is one of its greatest strengths.

Another is its structure. Telling the story in alternating chapters of Jack’s diary and a 1912 memoir by Jeb, an Irish reporter working under a penname for the Star, a London tabloid, Hunter pits the two against each other as initially unwitting foes. Jack, roaming Whitechapel and brutalizing the lone prostitutes, is driven by some unexplained mission. Jeb, ambitious and cold by his own admission, breaks crucial news about the first murders and starts to make a name for himself.

Jack, not insane but monstrous, is mysterious only in the sense that we hope to learn who he is and why he is doing this. Jeb is a more complicated creature. He realizes he is taking advantage of Jack’s crimes—and his mutilated victims—to build up his own reputation as a writer but genuinely believes in reporting the facts and castigates himself when lured into helping fake the letter that coins the killer’s name. A fellow reporter on the Star, an American, routinely speculates in print and fixates on anti-Semitic theories early on in the crime spree. Jeb worries that his reporting may cause vigilantism or—if his colleague has his way—pogroms.

Just as he develops qualms about his work, Jeb meets Professor Dare. A linguist and an advocate of what might later be called psychological conditioning, Dare offers to share his theory about Jack with Jeb—the killer is dyslexic, and has experience in the remote reaches of Afghanistan, where the women of the tribes disembowel prisoners in exactly the manner Jack does. Find a man matching this description—they decide to call it a “profile”—and they find Jack.

Added to his ambition and his unquiet desire to report accurately and responsibly, Jeb takes on detective work. This will place him on a path to a final collision with Jack the Ripper himself.

I don’t think I can reveal more without giving away too much. I, Ripper’s fictional plot, elegantly interlaced in the imagined diary of Jack and the memoir of Jeb—who turns out to be a real person with a famous name that I don’t want to give away—is solidly constructed and resolves in several good twists, some with surprisingly literary implications. It is one of this grim, gory book’s great enjoyments.

But only one. Another is Hunter’s imagining of the rumbustious world of London journalism. The former movie critic for the Washington Post, his Star newsroom and its combination of jocularity and callousness feels utterly real. A standout chapter is that in which Jeb, goaded into it by his editor and a colleague, forges the first and most famous Jack the Ripper letter. The calculated poetry of the letter and the group effort to get it notoriety is entertaining, convincing—the “Dear Boss” letter has been suspected of fakery since it appeared, but I had never considered its artistic and linguistic character before—and revealing.

“Newspapers,” Jack muses about halfway through. “What’s the point of existing if you’re always going to get everything so wrong?”

That’s the fictional side of I, Ripper. Another pleasure of the book is Hunter’s attention to the actual facts of the Jack the Ripper case. I’ve mentioned his vivid recreation of the grungy, bestial world of Whitechapel—which is not quite on the same level of depravity as a James Ellroy novel but might still leave you wanting to take a shower—but the crimes, the crime scenes, the victims, and many of the other real people involved are painstakingly imagined without the stiff, lifeless effect of some similarly detailed historical novels. The historical figures have personality, living and breathing as convincingly as the fictional characters.

This is especially important in the case of the victims. Hunter doesn’t soft-pedal their lifestyles or recast them as somehow noble, and yet, though staggering drunk, winkingly offering mortal sin to the passerby, or both at the same time, they feel like real people and worthy of sympathy. Their encounters with Jack evoke dread and pity and his treatment of them as objects, mere matter to be parted and manipulated for his own ends, seems more monstrous as a result.

Hunter committed himself to changing as few known historical details as possible, working around the truth rather than altering it for his fiction. In an afterword, he notes four minute details he tweaked, only two of which actually relate directly to Jack’s actions. An impressive achievement. And if you know the case well, he includes enough detail to pinpoint where his fictional story is weaving into the truth. For example, as Jack approaches Elizabeth Stride, the Swedish-born third victim, he passes a man wearing a deerstalker cap. This was a real man seen in conversation with Stride by the penultimate witness to see her alive, a police constable. This places Jack’s assault in time and in relation to other witnesses like Israel Schwartz, who, based on Hunter’s fictional reconstruction of events, did not actually see Jack.

Real life informs the fiction, which convincingly creates an alternative explanation for the known facts. This is a tricky bit of business for a novelist to pull off, and Hunter does it effortlessly—and, for the reader who doesn’t know their Jack the Ripper lore, invisibly and unobtrusively. His fictional solution, rooted as it is in the facts, offers enjoyable resolution to a real life mystery.

If I have any complaints whatsoever about I, Ripper they are minor: a handful of anachronisms (Belloc’s famous line about the Maxim gun, from 1898, is paraphrased by Jack ten years too early) and some tonal convergence of Jack’s diary and Jeb’s memoir that led me to suspect, briefly, that Jeb would turn out to be Jack (he doesn’t; Hunter is much better than that). I suspected the ultimate culprit early—it’s a whodunnit, or maybe who’s-doing-it, after all—but Hunter successfully obscures, misleads, and distracts so that the final reveal was still satisfying.

Finally—an odd complaint—I, Ripper is simply too good. I don’t think I can recommend it to just anyone. This is a gripping, disturbing thriller and a masterpiece of historical fiction, and Hunter’s success in conveying Jack’s horror is what makes it difficult to recommend. But if you’re interested in the case, enjoy a well-constructed crime and suspense novel, and think you can handle a few months in Whitechapel and the company of one of the worst people who ever lived, you should definitely check it out.

A Lodge in the Wilderness

Last week I reviewed a unique entry in John Buchan’s bibliography—the only children’s book he published in his lifetime. This week John Buchan June continues with another unique item, this one more a curiosity than anything: part novel, part philosophical dialogue, part political treatise, the 1906 book A Lodge in the Wilderness.

The book first introduces us to eccentric multi-millionaire Francis Carey, who after making his fortune in various business and government concerns throughout the British Empire, has established himself in a lavish country house in Kenya called Musuru. Every summer Carey invites eighteen people—nine men and nine women—to join him at Musuru for dinners, hunting, and intellectual conversation about the pressing issues of the day. A Lodge in the Wilderness is an account of one of these events.

Buchan briefly describes all eighteen of Carey’s guests, including a Conservative lord, a big game hunter, an ex-soldier with long experience of the Empire, a journalist, a Jewish financier, and a representative of the intelligence service. The female characters are mostly the wives of influential men but show themselves politically well-connected and informed and, as both Buchan biographers Andrew Lownie and Ursula Buchan point out, their contributions to Carey’s conversations are taken seriously. Nevertheless, most of the characters are ciphers and, after a chapter or two, become hard to distinguish. They are, as Lownie puts it, “merely mouthpieces for the book’s ideas.”

The two that give the story personality are Hugh Somerville and Lady Flora Brune, apparently based on Buchan himself and Susie Grosvenor, whom he would marry a year after the book’s publication. Hugh and Lady Flora become friends and the first hints of a romance kindle between the two, and their flirtations and conversations, which serve as interstitial episodes between the long dinner-time discussions, provide the most story A Lodge in the Wilderness has to offer.

Over the course of a month or so, Carey treats his guests to lion hunts, tours of his beautiful and seemingly endless mountainside gardens, field trips to missions and other colonial points of interest, and many intensely academic discussions of Empire.

And that’s about all there is to it. Though A Lodge in the Wilderness makes concessions to the novelistic form, especially small episodes of excitement like Hugh’s near-miss during the lion hunt, nothing resolves. I was prepared for this in the philosophical dimension of the book—which can only raise questions and suggest ways forward, and to which I’ll return shortly—but it was disappointing that, having developed Hugh and Lady Flora’s young romance so successfully, they do not get any kind of last-chapter send-off suggesting what will become of their relationship. A rare loose end for Buchan.

This is a reminder that the entire purpose of the book is philosophical and political. Written in Buchan’s early thirties after his return from the Transvaal in South Africa, where he had served as private secretary to colonial governor Lord Milner, A Lodge in the Wilderness is a response to changing policy and cultural attitudes toward the Empire back home. Better attuned critics than I, especially those who were alive at the time, have seen in the book’s characters stand-ins for real-life political figures, not least Cecil Rhodes. Buchan’s goal in the book is to lay out and examine the problems facing the British Empire as it stood during the Edwardian period, charitably work through opposing ideas, and suggest an ideal to strive toward—an ideal both of form and function.

Among the topics of discussion are the political basis of the Empire, its potential future structure and the role subject peoples will play democratically, and even—perhaps most interestingly—the aesthetic effects of imperialism on British culture. All of this is examined in excruciating detail. I wrote above that A Lodge in the Wilderness is “part philosophical dialogue,” and Hugh even reads Plato in the garden at one point, but there is really very little back-and-forth at dinner. The characters mostly make speeches, sometimes reading long poems or newspaper articles aloud to the whole party, with occasional pushback from someone else and an eventual attempt at synthesis. (Hegel is invoked more than once, an infallible sign one is in danger of being bored.)

Buchan seems to have known that not everyone would enjoy this. Halfway through, Lady Flora tells Hugh, “I do so wish . . . that they wouldn't all talk in paragraphs.” One sympathizes, as well as appreciating the self-aware laugh.

Some recent readers, to judge by reviews on sites like Goodreads, take some of the characters’ viewpoints as Buchan’s own and object to what they see as promotion of eugenics or a lust for conquest. Buchan, charitable to a fault, allows his characters to have opinions he disagreed with in order to offer a better alternative. His own views are sometimes difficult to parse but a number of important points show through clearly.

The view of the Empire that Buchan presents is benevolent and idealistic but hard to understand in the specifics. Negatively, he explicitly rules out conquest for its own sake, the equation of largeness and territorial size with goodness, the suppression and subordination of subject peoples, and the exploitation of the Empire for profit. Violence in an empire is inevitable but not to be sought out, enjoyed, or glorified. He also makes it clear that any backwardness or primitivism among non-European peoples is due not to race but to culture and opportunity, and he cautions against both denigrating native peoples and exaggerating their primitiveness as unspoiled goodness. He is neither jingo nor Social Darwinist.

What Buchan envisions instead is an ennobling enterprise that will make high moral, spiritual, and even physical demands of the imperialists, who will set an example for the complacent bourgeoisie at home. (Buchan’s critique of the middle class as apathetic and compromised is surprisingly sharp.) The purpose of the Empire is the spread of improvement—technologically, economically, and morally—and the eventual advancement and participation of all the peoples within its reach.

This view is essentially globalist, undergirded by a whiggish view of history. What sets Britain’s apart from other imperial projects, he suggests, is its long accidental development of the rule of law and the importance accorded to liberty. Having come into world power without plan or direction, the Empire is Britain’s opportunity deliberately to spread the good of liberty through order. In a phrase of Chesterton’s—who, no imperialist, would probably disapprove of me using it—the Empire at its best would “make room for good things to run wild.”

All of this should suggest to you that A Lodge in the Wilderness is now almost entirely of historical significance. It’s the only Buchan book I’ve read that I’d call a slog. (It doesn’t help that the cheap paperback I read has numerous text-recognition errors and formatting problems. If you do check this book out, avoid the edition whose cover I used above.) A Lodge in the Wilderness is informative as the dream of empire held by one principled, hopeful, well-intentioned man, and interesting as a strange outlier among Buchan’s fiction, but it is unsatisfying as a novel and will be unrewarding for the casual reader. I’m glad I read it but I very much doubt that I will ever revisit it.