'In The Tenth House' by Laura Dietz - Spiritualism and Science Meet on the Edge of the 19th Century

The year is 1896 and England is wiping the soot of the last hundred years from its eyes. Slowly, the shadows are being chased away by new, gas-powered streetlamps; human voices are crossing the boundaries of time and space via underwater cables, and revolutionary new treatments for psychological illnesses are coming over from the continent. This is where author Laura Dietz begins her tale.

Her protagonist is Dr Ambrose Genett, a psychiatrist. He is the picture of a Victorian gentleman: stiff, starched and repressed. Unlike his contemporaries, Ambrose knows that his profession is on the cusp of a renaissance – the old ways are on their way out, and any argument to the contrary is an affront to progress. He takes a similar view when it comes to the spiritualist hocus pocus that's been gaining popularity. We meet him as he is indulging in a spot of people-watching at Victoria Station. He's mainly interested in the women, but not in that way. "Titillation" is not "his object" because Ambrose Genett is a man of science. His interest in women is purely academic.

We are given a Holmes‑like analysis of the womenfolk: first, a flower girl licks her lips, then, an onion-shaped woman passes in her finery, and finally, a nursemaid scolds her misbehaving charge. Suddenly, a man collides with a woman attempting to board a third-class carriage. In the confusion, another man's suitcase slides off his shoulder and strikes the woman on the head. The woman goes down like a sack of potatoes, and her hat skips whimsically over the heads in the crowd. Genett approaches and offers to help, but the woman is too dazed to notice. She begins muttering disturbing prophecies: "This is what comes of lying to your mother" and "The cup -- the messenger would be in disguise!" Is she mad or is she simply an opportunistic street girl looking to part an honest gentleman with his money? 

Despite her ravings, Ambrose’s attraction to the woman is instant. The repressed desire to reach out and caress her is transmuted into a "disturbing and unprecedented" urge to fondle her skull from beneath her "luminous" skin (he laments no longer believing in phrenology as that would justify said fondling.)  Although Dietz allows us to be sympathetic to his frustration, she never lets us lose sight of the fact that without his white coat, Ambrose Genett would be just another pervert. The young woman manages to scrabble away, but her image burns itself into his memory: large dark eyes, pink lips, and a high alabaster forehead. 

Lily Embly is her name. She comes from a gypsy divining family. She and her mother Carola are the last of the clan still living and working in London. They make ends meet by holding fake seances for clients with more money than sense. Carola 'speaks' to the dead while Lily manipulates a system of hidden wires and pulleys. At her command, furniture lifts into the air, and invisible bells peal in the dimly-lit rooms of London's credulous and wealthy. Lily is completely in on the trick, and yet, she holds on to the belief that she genuinely possesses some psychic gifts, even performing tarot reading sessions when she’s not working with her mother. She has seen her own future in the cards, including a potentially hazardous meeting with a stranger at Victoria Station. But paper cards are fragile things, and they have the tendency to get misplaced. Her prophecies are liable to be compromised.

Meanwhile, Ambrose believes that the strange woman he met at the station is suffering from a psychological malady which he is determined to diagnose and treat once he finds her. A lot rides on his making a diagnosis, but it isn't altruism that drives him. He has a dead dad to prove wrong (his father never had much faith in his chosen profession), there are also the old psychiatry stuffs to impress, and finally, his half-sister, Ernestine, who’s been gadding about and attending seances without his permission. Once he discovers that this stranger is a medium who has Ernestine and their old aunt under her spell, it becomes even more imperative that he catch and expose this prophecy-spouting girl as a mad woman. Treating and curing her could be the solution to all problems. Plus, he kinda has a thing for her...

The novel is essentially a three-hundred-and-fifty-six-page chase between the two characters, with Ambrose playing the pursuer and Lily the pursued. Dietz shuffles and reshuffles time like one of Lily's tarot decks, slipping in a flashback here or flash-forward there to bridge the gaps between their perspectives. The undercurrent of sexual tension between the two is the main reason I kept reading this book, even when things became a bit tedious. There is an eventual release in the novel’s penultimate chapter when the two meet in a final, explosive encounter. It would have made for a thrilling ending if the author hadn't tacked on a gimmicky epilogue in which we jump to forty years into the future.

Dietz's writing is convincingly 19th Century. There's no doubt that a lot of research went into the making of this novel. Its main antagonists, a pair of roughly-drawn creditors read like they've walked straight out of a Dickens novel. They are thrown into the mix to provide some texture to the dog-eat-dog-world that was London at the turn of the century, but the threat they pose doesn't feel troubling given how cartoonish they are. In the novel’s defence, it’s a feast for historical fiction lovers, especially those interested in the legacies of figures like the stage magician and false medium Lulu Hurst, fraudster Eva Carrière, and the spooky Victorian obsession with spiritualism. But in my opinion, there isn't enough intrigue or story to justify the novel's length. It feels like the author wanted to pour all her research into it whether it’s necessary or not. This results in a clutter of lengthy correspondences between Ambrose and his medical partners, newspaper articles, advertisements, filler scenes, and book excerpts.

Funnily enough, I recently read a short story (‘Girls are Always Hungry When All The Men are Bite-Size' by Kirsty Logan) which reminded me of Dietz’s novel. In it, a young woman is holding a seance. The woman is a false medium who has been dressed up in chintzy Victoriana and, like Lily, put up to the whole charade by her mother. One of the attendees, an attractive young man, is introduced by Logan as a stalwart sceptic who is hellbent on exposing the woman's trickery. The stage is set, the room is darkened, and the mother instructs the participants to close their eyes and make a magic circle with their pinkie fingers. The young mystic keeps her eyes half-open and slips off her shoes in preparation to crack her toes on cue. She fantasises about slipping her foot between the man's legs while her mother begins speaking aloud to the spirits. Then, whilst she's imagining a passionate affair, the party hears strange noises and voices... but they aren’t part of the script.

Further seances are held, and the man returns, still looking to expose her. With each session, the voices grow stronger, along with the young woman's desire to possess the man. The man eventually requests a private seance so that he can ensure no one is interfering with the session. He also insists she holds it in her underwear so he can see that she isn’t concealing anything. During the session, the woman is overcome by an overwhelming external force; the voices return, the room contracts, the house is crushed to fit around her body like a bodice, and she opens her mouth and swallows the man whole. It’s only a twenty-three-page-long story, but it manages to convey the same key ideas that Dietz’s novel spent so long straining to arrive at. The weirdness, the pressure to make our parents proud, sexual repression, power, hauntings: it's all there, and in my opinion, it delivers these straight to the heart in a way Dietz's novel could not in all its fifty chapters of narration.