A review by phileasfogg
Armadale by Wilkie Collins, John Sutherland

5.0

Never let the two Allan Armadales meet in this world: never, never, never!

They meet.

An enjoyable Victorian psychological thriller. The initial set-up, with its multiple Allan Armadales, was suspiciously like the start of Martin Chuzzlewit, the last Victorian novel I attempted. (I may finish it someday, if ever I imagine myself to be immortal, and/or most other books disappear.)

But within a few pages it was clear that this was no Martin Chuzzlewit. I could almost imagine Wilkie Collins had read, or tried to read, his friend's novel, shaken his head, and thought, 'I'll show him what a novel looks like.'

There is more exciting incident in the prologue of Armadale than there could be in ten Martin Chuzzlewits. Disinheritance, murder, a sea chase, seduction, shipwreck, elopement, pursuit, poisoning, fraud, impersonation, false identities. Not necessarily in that order.

This book should be a TV series. The prologue could be the first season.

Where Collins differs most from Dickens is that he is more interested in telling an exciting and entertaining story, even if it is a little improbable. The characters have weird experiences where dreams appear to bleed into reality. They are afflicted by coincidences that a later writer would have felt obliged to invent an improbability drive to justify. A character's paranoid delusions turn out to represent the merest shadow of the real conspiracy.

Do the coincidences require a supernatural explanation? I don't think so. It is a sad and curious fact that literary theorists have a prejudice against coincidence, and generally treat it as a weakness in novels. Even though they, like everyone else, must have experienced remarkable coincidences in their own lives, in cities vastly more populous than the cities these coincidence-filled Victorian novels were set in. It is from these everyday unlikely-seeming events that stories emerge. London, at the time Armadale is set, had not many more people in it than my own provincial city has now, where seemingly coincidental connections between people are so commonplace that there is a standard comical response: 'Adelaide's a small town'.

It's a complicated novel, and I seriously considered drawing a plot diagram when I temporarily lost track of which Allan Armadale was which Allan Armadale's son. (I doodled a page of blobs and lines once, and realised I'd only covered the prologue.) Fortunately, most of the time there's only one person actually calling himself Allan Armadale, and the other Allan Armadale goes by a pseudonym. On one occasion I felt that the complication might have got the better of the author. At the risk of spoiling something,

Spoiler

it seemed inconceivable that the paranoid Midwinter could learn the name of his neighbour's governess without being horrified--when the tiniest coincidence would set off his paranoia, it seems absurd that he could rationalise that there must be, ooh, a dozen Lydia Gwilts in England. Perhaps the fact that he secretly has the same name as his best friend makes this coincidence seem less suggestive

. Also at the risk of spoiling something, I thought

Spoiler

it might have been fun if the wrong Allan Armadale had answered the newspaper advertisement and received the confessional letter, and gone through the novel believing that his father had done what the other Allan Armadale's father had done, and that each Allan Armadale was the other.

The man who calls himself Allan Armadale, and his girlfriend, are likeable but not the most fascinating characters, and the novel might be improved if their romance was compressed. But the two other main characters are compelling, unique and fully believable creations. Most especially the villainess, Lydia Gwilt, must be one of the great characters of fiction, and the diary that reveals her inner life is as great a feat of imagination and writing skill as I've seen in 19th century fiction.

The 'detection' aspect of the novel was especially interesting. One 'detective' is a young small-town lawyer who expertly navigates the informational world of London. From his exploits you have to suppose that lawyers in the mid-19th-century performed a role similar to private detectives in our time. Then there are the agents of the Private Inquiry Office in Shadyside Place, who are as shady as their address suggests, and are surely based on a real organisation of the time.