Books & Poetry

This first instalment of ten takes us at full lick into a novel of desire, sensation and desperate jeopardy. Miss Temple has come to a country somewhere on the European mainland, where English names are common and which borders the independent German state of Mecklenburg. The characters travel by carriage, slow train and airship, with every convenience of a pre-electrical age and some interesting alchemical gadgetry as well. It is, in other words, set in a time and place that never existed outside the Ruritanian gaslight romance.

Jilted by her fiancé Bascombe, Celeste Temple sets out to find out why, discovering in the process resources of pluck and ingenuity she did not know she had. Using simple disguises, a pair of opera glasses and a talent for simple and plausible deceit, she tracks him to a remote country house where a masked ball is in full swing, and finds something far more sinister going on. Fragments of blue glass are a factor in this, as are the mysterious scars, like burns from red-hot goggles, that she first sees on a corpse, but which we see again and again in later episodes.

Celeste is not the mysterious Dahlquist’s only protagonist – she is joined later by two other adventurers with radically different characters and purposes. She is perhaps his most endearing, simply because she is a privileged nineteenth-century woman pushed by adversity into a self-respect and courage that make her a more modern sort of heroine.

This is a horribly knowing book in some ways – from a starting point of prudish respectability Celeste’s adventures take her through the crust into a world of thrilling perversity and brutal violence. Dahlquist gives us something that is in no real way a pastiche – no one could really write like this in the time whose literary mannerisms it apes – but which is genuinely exciting and intriguing. Each episode churns with adrenaline and leaves us suspended over a gulf of anxiety for the characters’ fates; if the serial is to return, this is the book to do it.