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Thirty-year-old Lydia, step-daughter of Lord Cassington, is married to Marcus Langstone, whose has run out of family money and who dreams of recouping his fortunes by rising to political influence via Oswald Mosely's growing British fascist party. When, in a fit of drunken pique, he slaps her silly, Lydia hesitates not at all, but packs her bag and flees to her father's rooms in a decaying square with the rather sinister name of Bleeding Heart. The time is 1934, but in some respects it could be seventy-five years earlier. Dickens would certainly recognize some of the seedier characters that populate No. 7 - the landlord, Serridge, who seems to sit at the centre of an obscure net connecting many of the residents; Lydia's father, alcoholic and ineffectual; and the dog Nip. Nor have class restraints altered much since Dickens' day, as Lydia finds out abruptly when, no longer mistress of a Mayfair home, the subtle disdain of the taxi driver who bears her off to Bleeding Heart Square informs her that she is vulnerable in unpleasant ways. Her new world is one of constraint and the smells of cooking liver and the mean and money-scrimping contrivances that poverty requires. In a particularly Dickensian touch, Lydia's nose is assaulted by a more unpleasant odour - the smell of rotting beef hearts that someone has been posting to the landlord. Contemporary novelists have seized upon crime fiction as a means of structuring a narrative approach to historical fiction that is far from the cheerful romps of Regency bodice rippers. Here, Taylor's attention is on a critical moment in relatively recent history, when new directions for ordinary human beings were beginning to be possible but were by no means fully actualized. This state of flux is especially notable in the female characters who occupy the same contemporary space but live lives that might be separated by a century or more. Only four years have passed since Miss Penhow made her last entries in her diary and left the scene, yet the reader has the sense that she is a woman who would be much more at home in the Dickensian world than Lydia, who turns her back on a disaster of a marriage and bravely sets about to earn her living. Miss Penhow's diary reveals a woman reared at a time when a woman's worth resided in the man she married; unmarried, she was surplus to requirements. In fact, I had to keep reminding myself that she must have been born in about the same year as Virginia Woolf, whose A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN sustains Lydia as she tries to establish her independence. The male characters are also in flux, though presented with different paths to follow. Perceiving a loss in power and status following the Great War, some members of the upper middle class, like Lydia's husband and his hero, the real Oswald Mosely, embrace violence as evidence of a masculinity that suddenly needs proving, while others, like Julian Dawlish, cast their lot with the socialists and the working class, anticipating the choices that were soon to be made over Spain. One of the great pleasures of BLEEDING HEART SQUARE is that it provides much material for reflection while still remaining a thoroughly engrossing mystery. Like all good historical fiction, it informs us about both past and present. The characters, though shaped and shaded by their historical moment, are people we still care about. And the conclusion is, in its own way, quietly shocking.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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