English Derby crime caper
By Christopher Benfey |
May 11, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CASUAL fans of the Kentucky Derby, mint juleps in hand, can't be expected to extend their curiosity much beyond the woozy singing of "My Old Kentucky Home" and the chaotic two minutes of racing that follow, unless a Triple Crown winner seems a serious possibility.
One is unlikely to hear any mention of another, equally famous Derby (pronounced "Darby") taking place a month later at Epsom Downs in England. Unlike its Kentucky counterpart, the Epsom Derby, the subject of an intricately plotted and stylistically burnished crime caper by the English writer D.J. Taylor, is run on turf over uneven terrain. While these differences may seem slight, the cultural gulf between the two derbies might as well divide baseball from cricket.
A kindred difference may seem to distinguish the historical novel in America, fixated on the Civil War and other national traumas, from its more sedate English cousin, with its country houses, its upstairs-downstairs class divisions and its occasional eruptions of incongruous violence.
"Derby Day," which was nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, is partly set in the dilapidated, rook-haunted estate of Scroop Hall, circa 1870. "Too grim and too remote, too Gothick" to attract the curious traveler, Scroop is inhabited by a widower named Davenant; his spectral, moon-faced daughter, Evie; and various predatory hangers-on, flitting ghostlike among the "livid and arsenical" shrubbery. Nothing is thriving in this melancholy redoubt except a racehorse named Tiberius, of dubious provenance, and even he is under threat after a nighttime attack.
A clutch of audacious schemers is intrigued by the horse. There is Happerton, a "thrusting" sort of sporting man, in top boots and cutaway coat, who marries money, buys up Davenant's debts by means legal and not, is in league with a sinister safecracker, and eventually ends up in possession of both Scroop Hall and Tiberius, whom he intends to run in the Derby. Whether he intends him to win or to lose remains, like much else in this tantalizing novel, mysterious to the end.
Happerton's calculating wife, Rebecca, who reminds us "of that other Rebecca in Mr Thackeray's novel," intends, with her green eyes flashing, to make her mark in the world. And there are lowlifes hired for interlocking machinations as Derby Day approaches.
A caper requires detectives, not only the official types and they sort and ruminate through evidence with their own motives. There's a roving narrator who might have strayed from Dickens or Trollope and plenty of color to evoke the crush and clutter of 19th-century crowds.
There are larger themes but they remain sequestered in the margins, as Taylor builds the suspense, sending his characters to the racetrack for the final event.
One is unlikely to hear any mention of another, equally famous Derby (pronounced "Darby") taking place a month later at Epsom Downs in England. Unlike its Kentucky counterpart, the Epsom Derby, the subject of an intricately plotted and stylistically burnished crime caper by the English writer D.J. Taylor, is run on turf over uneven terrain. While these differences may seem slight, the cultural gulf between the two derbies might as well divide baseball from cricket.
A kindred difference may seem to distinguish the historical novel in America, fixated on the Civil War and other national traumas, from its more sedate English cousin, with its country houses, its upstairs-downstairs class divisions and its occasional eruptions of incongruous violence.
"Derby Day," which was nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, is partly set in the dilapidated, rook-haunted estate of Scroop Hall, circa 1870. "Too grim and too remote, too Gothick" to attract the curious traveler, Scroop is inhabited by a widower named Davenant; his spectral, moon-faced daughter, Evie; and various predatory hangers-on, flitting ghostlike among the "livid and arsenical" shrubbery. Nothing is thriving in this melancholy redoubt except a racehorse named Tiberius, of dubious provenance, and even he is under threat after a nighttime attack.
A clutch of audacious schemers is intrigued by the horse. There is Happerton, a "thrusting" sort of sporting man, in top boots and cutaway coat, who marries money, buys up Davenant's debts by means legal and not, is in league with a sinister safecracker, and eventually ends up in possession of both Scroop Hall and Tiberius, whom he intends to run in the Derby. Whether he intends him to win or to lose remains, like much else in this tantalizing novel, mysterious to the end.
Happerton's calculating wife, Rebecca, who reminds us "of that other Rebecca in Mr Thackeray's novel," intends, with her green eyes flashing, to make her mark in the world. And there are lowlifes hired for interlocking machinations as Derby Day approaches.
A caper requires detectives, not only the official types and they sort and ruminate through evidence with their own motives. There's a roving narrator who might have strayed from Dickens or Trollope and plenty of color to evoke the crush and clutter of 19th-century crowds.
There are larger themes but they remain sequestered in the margins, as Taylor builds the suspense, sending his characters to the racetrack for the final event.
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