THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 31, 1995 TAG: 9505310018
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
MURDER, IT IS observed in Peter Ackroyd's new novel, ``The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders'' (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 261 pp., $22) is ``a bourgeois preoccupation.''
``. . . We dwell on the suffering of one and forget about the sufferings of many. When we ascribe guilt to one single agent, then we deny the responsibility of all.''
The speaker is John Cree, failed dramatist and fledging theater critic by day, sadistic serial killer by night. The scene is London, in 1880, and Cree is chatting with Karl Marx as the two share a cab on their way home from the British Museum's Reading Room.
Marx and Cree are Reading Room regulars, arriving daily to immerse themselves in thick texts. Marx has spent the hours perusing Tennyson's ``In Memorium'' and ``Bleak House'' by Charles Dickens, while Cree alternated between ``History of the London Poor'' and ``A Few Sighs From Hell.''
Despite his own comfortable background, Cree is ``fascinated by poverty, and by the crime and disease which it engendered.'' After dark, he roams the filthy, despair-ridden streets of Victorian London, murdering and dismembering prostitutes and others with original flair and an eye for the aesthetic.
``The head came off first,'' he writes in his diary, ``and the intestinal tract made a very pretty decoration beside the womb.''
Concentrating his efforts on Limehouse Reach, an old road winding uphill from the Thames, Cree is the self-appointed agent of an evil and pitiless society. His feats, stylistically detailed in Ackroyd's seamless prose, are malevolent works of art. As is this book.
At its core, ``The Trial of Elizabeth Cree'' is an intellectually overwrought, neo-gothic snuff novel. Beautifully written, albeit in Ackroyd's condescending tone, it perfectly evokes the pervasive drudgery of 19th century London, with its cheap music halls, its ragged streetwalkers and beggars, its petty morality and bad food.
But like the times of which he writes, Ackroyd's book is ultimately a struggle to endure. Witty and ingenious on one hand, it is pathologically bitter and sardonic on the other. Reading it is a little like being cornered by a brilliant but mean drunkard. Interesting at first, but after 15 minutes, the need for fresh air and freedom from invective overcomes all curiosity.
This sensation isn't helped by Ackroyd's vague but irritating hints in the final pages that he has cunningly manipulated the reader.
Perhaps, Ackroyd intimates, Cree's sociopathic wife, Elizabeth, was the real murderer. A former music hall performer who has taken to wandering the streets in drag, Elizabeth Cree, it is hinted, may have adopted her husband's persona and committed the murders herself, then faked her husband's diaries and killed him.
In the end, your patience could be the final victim of Ackroyd's Limehouse Golem. by CNB