John MacLachlan GrayCritiques

I realise this is a novel and and not history as such, but a few things have raised questions in my mind. Was murder so prevalent in Victorian London that the police would ignore a corpse in the street? Did people really have wooden teeth?

I am so biased when it comes to Billy Bishop on account of working inside his house for the past two summers relaying all of his personal history to tourists and hearing so many stories from veterans of how he influenced and inspired them to join in WWII (veteran pilots, in particular). This is Canada's most famous musical (Anne of Green Gables: The Musical comes in second), I think of probably four musicals total. It really is well done, very appealing, and very funny, and throughout has that Canadian fear of glorifying ourselves, even deservedly.

Billy Bishop Goes to War by John MacLachlan Gray is the March 2015 bonus title for the Canadian Reads Challenge. Plays are funny things to read in that they are really and truly meant to be seen as performances. Actors read plays to learn their lines and become their characters — but reading one as written literature is something else entirely.

My father who did a bunch of acting in college owns a collection of the best contemporary plays (plays that were popular in the first half the 20th century). There was a time when we'd go camping at Green Valley Falls as a family and somehow one of those volumes of plays would end up in the reading material pile for that weekend. One night out of desperation (called teenage boredom) I cracked open the volume and read Arsenic and Old Lace (1943) by Joseph Kesselring. It was magnificent.

Now Billy Bishop Goes to War is a very different beast, in that it's written for a very limited cast (as in two people playing multiple roles). The person cast as Billy Bishop must be versatile enough to play the bulk of the cast, as it's Billy's recounting of his time in WWI. Rather than just telling the audience who he met and what they told him, Billy becomes those people.

If I were to compare Billy Bishop Goes to War to another stage production, I'd say it's most like Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray (which is both a memoir and a monologue). Except with the WWI setting and the poking fun at the British aristocracy and their disdain for colonials (Canadians and anyone else from the Commonwealth), there's also a heavy helping of Blackadder Goes Forth.

As the introduction states, Billy Bishop is really two plays. Which play that is performed depends on the age of the actor playing Billy. If he's a young man, the play is done one way (and is longer, by the way). If he's an old man, the play is shorted to jump him right to the point of being a Canadian pilot hero. If you take in the large amount of wiggle room given to the piano player / narrator role, namely in how the songs (or in some cases, what music) are performed, then it can be any number of plays, following one of two branches.

That's not to say this sort of variation is unique to Billy Bishop Goes to War. It's not. Think of Shakespeare. His plays are done in modern settings, or gender swapped, or as musicals. But a lot of this interpretation is left to director or to the version being performed (Kiss Me Kate instead of Taming of the Shrew for instance). For Billy Bishop Goes to War, all the variations are left on the page and are left to the performers to pick and chose from.

An enjoyable book, but not without its problems.

It took me ages to finish The Fiend In Human, not because it was boring, but because it was so rich and dense with characters and period detail. I had to take breaks in order to take it all in.

There were some problems with the pacing, and some characters seemed interchangeable, but overall it was an entertaining book.

Beware, though, Gray stays true to the attitudes of Victorian England, so there are some references that might trip a reader up. References to people being in the 'n***er line of work', where they paint their skin brown and play instruments with ivory carved to look like bones, or the many references to the subtle misogyny of the age may be too much for some readers. I give this as a warning.

An enjoyable book, but not without its problems.

It took me ages to finish The Fiend In Human, not because it was boring, but because it was so rich and dense with characters and period detail. I had to take breaks in order to take it all in.

There were some problems with the pacing, and some characters seemed interchangeable, but overall it was an entertaining book.

Beware, though, Gray stays true to the attitudes of Victorian England, so there are some references that might trip a reader up. References to people being in the 'n***er line of work', where they paint their skin brown and play instruments with ivory carved to look like bones, or the many references to the subtle misogyny of the age may be too much for some readers. I give this as a warning.

Not particularly enjoyable or interesting. A Victorian Thriller, set in the 1850's but written in 2003. I think the author managed the style and the sense of place well but the story was a muddle. It took forever to get going and then just meandered along to an end, without any real sense of drama. I just fininshed it to finish it and I didn't really care what happened at all. I think I've probably read enough BookCrossing books of late and I need to get back into my own collection for a little while, read some books that I picked!

Funny yet engaging look at the whirlwind life of Billy Bishop, who lands himself in the flying corps during WWI. The language is clear; one can see how this play has been so successfully performed over the years. Book contains an excellent introduction to the history of the play.

Set in England during Victorian times, this is a rather creepy but compelling read. Edmund Whitty is an unlikely hero, oddly sympathetic, maybe because he sees how society's standards for the "quality" are so skewed and hypocritical. Seances, drugs, pornography, murder, violence, dry humour--it's all here.

My hat's off to this author. The first book was okay, but this one was really good. Characters are good (sometimes comic in the midst of the suspense), well drawn; dialogue is really awesome, and the story itself is intriguing and will definitely hold your interest. I hope Mr. Gray wants to write a third in this series; I'll definitely be waiting. Would I recommend it? You bet. If you like thriller-type stories set in Victorian England, you'll like this one.

here's a brief peek with no spoilers:
Edmund Whitty, correspondent with the newspaper The Falcon, has picked up a new habit of relaxing in the Turkish baths. As he's sitting there one day, an American comes up to him and offers him some money to do a job for him. It seems that there is a "spiritualist" who engages in quackery and rips people off and the man (who works for the Pinkerton agency) wants Whitty to get evidence that will discredit this guy. So off Whitty goes to attend a seance held by the con man. He knows it's fake, but he has a moment of doubt when he hears a voice claiming to be his dead brother David saying that he didn't die the way everyone thought he did. This gets Whitty thinking, and a series of events that take place following the seance sets him off on an extraordinary adventure, which leads to the exposure of some of the seamier currents running below Victorian society's surface. A fun book, and a good element of suspense that will keep you turning the pages to see how things turn out. Don't be surprised if one of the main characters reminds you of Lewis Carroll...the author intended it to be so.

I try to read any fiction which involves Victorian-era spiritualism, and I'd recommend this book to people who may be of the same mind. Also, if you are going to read this one, please start with book #1 so you're not lost character wise.

Fun book for those who like Victorian settings in their mysteries.

This is one of those books where the whole thing doesn't make sense until you've finished it. Written in a definitely Victorian mode, it is both a tour of Victorian London and a mystery. If you're not used to writing done in this style, it can be a bit off-putting, to say the least.

The characters are well drawn and the story is a good one. The main character is a Mr. Edmund Whitty, a reporter for The Falcon, a newspaper that has no qualms with sensationalizing to try to outdo the rival papers. Sadly, Mr. Whitty is most times down on his luck, and in debt to some creepy character known as The Ratter, who has a very bizarre way of getting back at those who don't pay up. That scene made me cringe just thinking about it! Whitty also puts away a little too much alcohol, enjoys being a part-time opium eater, and is just an inventive ploy away from being tossed out of his rented room. In this story, the buzz on the streets is that a serial killer is roaming the streets of London, strangling his victims with a white gentleman's scarf. While the infamous "Chokee Bill" is put away in prison, however, the crimes continue, and Whitty, along with a very strange "patterer" named Mr. Owler, are trying to see that justice is done. Their quest: to get the wrong guy out of prison and put the right one in. I won't say more.

Quite well done, but it does have a tendency here and there to drag so that I found myself skimming a little to move things along. Overall, a pretty first in series. I would recommend it to those who enjoy a good novel set in Victorian London; people who pick this up expecting a cozy or easy read might be disappointed.½