Book Review: Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney

If you’ve fallen under the spell of Caleb Carr in his brilliant novel, The Alienist and its sequel The Angel of Darkness, then you might pick this one up believing it to be another atmospheric novel set in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City. After all, Carr turned the detritus of historical detail, research insights, and even the most apparently irrelevant of factoids into a superbly textured and fascinating historical mystery.

The Advisory Editor of the prestigious NY literary-zine Paris Review, author Elizabeth Gaffney has almost certainly read Carr before embarking on her ambitious debut. She’s also read Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York, on which the Martin Scorcese film of the same name was based. And there’s more than a whiff of E.L. Doctorow as well, whose Ragtime remains perhaps the single most evocative and moving portrait of New York city of that time period. She’s also done her research well.

Unfortunately, all the reading and research in the world can’t make up for a lacklustre book.

The problem starts almost at once. Metropolis opens with a beautifully-drawn map and a series of richly-detailed passages of life on the streets in that lost era. You can almost conjure images from Scorcese’s brilliantly-designed Gangs to go with the passages here.

But a few dozen pages in, the descriptions start to wear you down, the introspective monologues get tedious, and the pace doesn’t really pick up. Even that might be acceptable; after all, one of the most brilliant authors of historical literary novels, John Banville, often doesn’t have very much happening in his books, which doesn’t make them any less than goddamn bloody brilliant—his latest nomination to the Booker only confirms his towering literary talent.

Elizabeth Gaffney is far from being a writer of Banville’s prodigious talents. After a few chapters you start to notice the workmanlike prose peeping through the piled-up historical detail, and once the offbeat love story gets going—that's right, it's an historical and a mystery and a romance novel—you begin to wonder just where this book is heading.

It's heading for the romance section, in my opinion. Because if viewed as an historical romance, it's far above the average Regency or even the spate of hardcover romances that have overtaken the traditional bodice-ripper on the bestseller lists. But as a literary novel, or even a literary mystery, it falls far short of the bar.

Article Author: Ashok K. Banker

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