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Stephen Jarvis’s upcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick is a sprawling book, in terms both of its 800-page girth and of its structure. I’ve read the first third and decided to write about it now before I forget the details.
There’s a present-day frame story about the narrator writing the book, commissioned by an old man obsessed with Late Georgian London’s printmaking and periodicals. This story only adds up to a few pages strewn through the first third, but there are weird things going on in it. Why does the narrator suddenly bring up his anorexic mother? I’m more curious about where this is going than about the main narrative inside the frame, whose general outline is a matter of known literary history.
The main story so far is a straight historical novel about Robert Seymour, now remembered chiefly as the suicidal first illustrator of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Jarvis appears to be one of those who agree with Seymour’s widow that Dickens owed considerably more of Pickwick to the dead man than a few illustrations.
The sprawling character of the novel comes from innumerable long digressions from this storyline, amounting to a crash course in the literary and artistic antecedents of Pickwick. Dickens isn’t even mentioned in the first third, though he is most likely present as an unnamed boy at one or two points.
I quite like the book even though the first third has no female main characters. In fact, it mainly has lots of minor characters who play walk-on parts in relation to Seymour’s life story, and to developments in the era’s interlinked printmaking and magazine businesses. It’s a play acted on Jane Austen’s stage, fifteen years or so after all the interesting female characters have left, taking their concerns with interpersonal relationships with them. Should the book fall into the hands of a reader who isn’t familiar with Dickens, it will probably appear quite baffling, meandering and pointless. But of course, the word “Pickwick” is in the title, and so the intended readership is indicated rather clearly. I look forward to reading on.
Stephen Jarvis’s Death and Mr Pickwick will be out in the UK from Penguin Random House on 21 May, and in the US from Farrar, Straus & Giroux on 23 June.
