I'm a little late to this party - but then I'm a little late to most parties it seems, hence a lot of my recent reading. Mark Gatiss has now written three Lucifer Box novels and I've only just picked up the first one. Shame on me!
The Vesuvius Club is quite simply wonderful. It has charm, texture, pace, twists, intrigue, sex and all sorts of Edwardian weather in it. As with much of Arthur Conan Doyle's and Jules Verne's outputs, the types of settings are so familiar to us that we'll willingly paint in background detail to dress the scenes, regardless of whether we've encountered London or Naples from a century ago or seen a steampunk uber-villain's lair under a volcano. As readers at times we can be very easily manipulated by a good writer, and Gatiss is an excellent writer.
His prose flows, and the sharp jabs of wit don't become too wearing on the patience (which is my main gripe with Oscar Wilde, I must say). It's cocky, confident, utterly hilarious at times and also surprisingly violent at others - surprising because it's often thrown in as an aside, or unexpectedly with a kind of careless abandon. A number of instances rather turned my stomach (I have a weak constitution at times!) and caused me to re-read them in case I'd misunderstood or overlooked an action leading up to it - which invariably I hadn't. But this is both a defining aspect of the main character and a way to keep the readers on their toes.
The story relies a lot on coincidence, and Box himself relies a lot on luck. These are not problems. This is not a social commentary novel or a pretence at realism, no matter how authenticly Gatiss has written it for the period. In fact one constantly expects all aspects of the story to be tied in together somehow. Box is unrepentantly upper class and has no qualms about the tasks he is given to perform. You often love him and loath him at the same time, although thanks to his wit, charm and style you can't help but love him more often than not.
Part of the playfulness of the text and our immediate simultaneous loving and loathing of the main character is that as readers we condition ourselves not to trust anyone. We want Box to succeed, somehow, but it wouldn't surprise us if everyone turns out to be out to get him at some point. In this we are largely not disappointed, I must say.
Gatiss clearly had fun with names - Lucifer Box, Tom Bowler, Bella Pok and various others. He gets away with it because he doesn't draw attention to it and it's all so in keeping with the general style of the piece. That's why Dickens got away with slightly daft or representative names for some of his characters too - as soon as someone in a book observes that another has a silly name you've broken the spell and suddenly everyone has to be George Smith or Brenda Taylor, not Cretaceous Unmann or Anne Chickenstalker.
Mark may not have intended it this way, but I couldn't help reading the book with the kind of voice and delivery he himself gives when recounting 'The Curse of Karrit Poor' as a Jackanory story on one of the extras on The League of Gentlemen's Christmas Special DVD.
As a fellow Doctor Who fan I wasn't looking out for influences any more than I might have looked out for Sherlock Holmes influences, although I couldn't help thinking that the metal-helmetted slaves owe much to the Robomen from The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) and Mark seems to have discreetly borrowed aspects of that ultimately silly story premise and combined them with another equally silly premise from the 1967 story The Underwater Menace to threaten all of Italy with molten lava at the whim of some mad genius.
Having gushed awfully about this book I will add, though, that although I loved it I didn't finish it desperate to pick up the next in the series. Lucifer Box is a character best dipped into now and again (pun possibly intended) and I think he would try the reader's patience if over-exposed. I fully intend to read The Devil In Amber and Black Butterfly in due course, but not straight away.
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