Mr. Timothy
Louis Bayard
Harper Perennial, 2003
Trade paper, reprint
ISBN 0060534222
416 pages; $13.95

It’s the time of year when many of us reach for tattered copies of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and read it aloud with our families, or attend a theatrical production of a play taken from the tale, or watch Albert Finney or Patrick Stewart or even Bill Murray reenact the age-old tale on our television sets. My favorite line has always been from very early on in the play, when Scrooge is denying Marley’s existence: “There is more of gravy than of the grave about you.” Ah! What a way with words.

The tale wraps up with a “happily ever after,” of course, and one goes about one’s way merrily celebrating the holiday, imbued with the proper spirit of Christmas, inclined to give and give some more, and to understand that money is nothing without the regard of one’s fellows and the very special pleasures of charity. But what really happens to the Cratchits after Scrooge has his epiphany? And Tiny Tim – what of him? Is he cured? And what does he do with the life so unexpectedly handed to him when he thought he would have none?

Louis Bayard undertakes to answer these questions in Mr. Timothy, a Victorian novel of the modern age. When we first discover Tim, he is wholly dependent on Scrooge’s monthly handout. He lives in a whorehouse, where he receives room and board, ostensibly in return for bookkeeping, but actually in return for teaching the madam, Mrs. Sharpe, how to read (Robinson Crusoe is their text). His family is scattered to the four winds, his mother and father both dead (his father only recently), his siblings dead or missing, with only Peter having made something of himself (he is a photographer with a respectable studio). Tim is haunted by his own specters, seeing his father in every similar face, every angular body that crosses his path, but the disappointment he feels in himself is purely his own. He seems to have no real life, but only an existence.

Ten days before Christmas in 1860, it all begins to change. Tim sees the corpse of a young girl in an alley, pale as porcelain, her hands curled into claws and a “G” branded into her arm. It is only his first sighting of such a corpse, and such a brand, before he comes across a live and very lively specimen of a branded child, Philomela. Philomela is recently arrived from Italy, and her father, like Tim’s, has only recently died, leaving her an orphan in a strange land where she does not speak the language. It is clear, though, that she is in grave danger that she cannot – or will not – explain. And so begins Tim’s quest, his own Christmas Carol (without spirits), as he seeks to save Philomela and the other eight-to-ten-year-olds who are in the grip of some horrific plot that claims their minds and their lives.

Mr. Timothy starts slowly, reminding me why I have never been a fan of Victorian or Victorian-style prose. Tim is depressed and depressing, a man who apparently was never the child his father made him out to be. He is also a victim of charity, rather than its beneficiary; he has learned to be dependent rather than grateful, and has done nothing with opportunity. It is hard to read of such a man as he describes himself with relentless candor and self-loathing.

However, once the true adventure that is the subject of the book takes off, however, Tim begins to show the stuff he is truly made of. Tim and his strange ad hoc family of Philomela, Colin, a boy he has previously used for carrying the odd message, and Gully, a fisherman who longs for the day he can retire to Majorca, take on malevolent, perverted and powerful forces that have co-opted most of the London police and clothed themselves in a missionary’s virtue. It is a wonderful story of good triumphing over evil, suitable for any Victorian sensibility overlaid with 21st century concerns.

I’ve never been one to give a book fifty pages and give up on it if it hasn’t captured my attention by then, and this book makes me glad of it. But if you, like me, happen to have little patience for the leisurely pace of even a faux-Victorian novel, I urge you to stick with this one. Your patience will be well-rewarded with a rollicking adventure, well-written and deeply satisfying.