Poor Gideon Bliss and his dicky tummy. Whenever Bliss ventures into an odiferous area of London or casts his eyes upon a mutilated corpse—both unavoidable and regular occurrences for this London Metropolitan Police sergeant—he struggles not to retch. More often than not, his is a losing battle, for the serial murder case Bliss follows in Paraic O’Donnell’s novel The Naming of the Birds presents horrors enough to turn stronger stomachs.
Part 1: it’s 1872, rural England. In a spooky old building called the Chapel, a man is renaming children who’ve survived a deadly orphanage fire. The new names are those of birds—Magpie, Lark, Finch—and among the children is a particularly alert and watchful girl called Nightingale. All at the Chapel is wreathed in shadow and mystery, yet Nightingale understands that this man and his colleagues are testing the children. For what, she doesn’t know, but she senses that those who pass the test will face something even more terrible. These men and this place are full of secrets, but Nightingale also carries a secret.
So does Inspector Henry Cutter, Gideon Bliss’s superior officer. Part 2: the scene is London, the year 1894. A retired army commander is found dead in his well-appointed library, stabbed in the back of his neck, a clue clutched in his rigid fist. Cutter and Bliss are on the case. The inspector is brusque, competent, physically strong, and savvy. Whereas Bliss tends to wax eloquent at inopportune moments, Cutter knows when to stay silent. Dealing with witnesses, informants, servants, or colleagues, Cutter doles out surly looks and withering remarks as though it’s as much his job to insult people as it is to investigate crimes. After one of Bliss’s lengthy speeches, he says, “If you ever feel the urge to unburden yourself like that again, will you do me a kindness and write it down instead. … And then cross out at least two-thirds of it.”
One may wonder how Bliss, a former divinity student, came to be working alongside this gruff fellow, and in a line of work for which he seems so ill suited. The novel briefly recaps the story of how this unlikely partnership of tyro and tyrant began. The full origin story is told in The House on Vesper Sands, O’Donnell’s previous novel, which also introduced the third member of this crime-fighting team, Octavia Hillingdon. An energetic journalist, full of curiosity, Hillingdon has friends in high places and a knack for archival research—an important skill in this new case that will require the team to uncover buried sins of the past as elderly men of high rank are killed, each in a remarkably precise manner. For several reasons, Bliss suspects the case involves children, and because we have read about the trials of Nightingale and her fellow orphans, we suspect the same.
The best, most beloved British Victorian novels feature orphans—Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Oliver Twist. O’Donnell’s fiction calls back to such 19th century favorites, employing recognizable features and tropes. In less capable hands, the use of these elements could come across as musty and stilted. But fear not, O’Donnell revivifies Victorian and Gothic genre conventions, making the shadows shadowier, the fog foggier, the orphans orphanier. Both The Naming of Birds and The House on Vesper Sands contain a delectable mixture of old-fashioned storytelling and contemporary verve; the books are smart and a pleasure to read. (I haven’t yet read O’Donnell’s first novel, The Maker of Swans, but look forward to getting my hands on it.)
So how does O’Donnell do it? For one thing, each character feels fully alive. Take Octavia Hillingdon, who has the independent spirit of Jane Eyre and the venturesome confidence of Becky Sharp. So many of Dickens’s female characters drip with treacly goodness or brim over with malice, but Hillingdon does neither. She manages to possess both a moral compass and a sense of humor. She’s an independent career woman who’s also queer, if I’m correctly reading her briefly depicted relationship with a lady friend. Hillingdon feels like a modern woman, and she plays an important role in the story.
Then there’s O’Donnell’s writing. The narration is by turns no-nonsense, lyrical, clever, and evocative, rich in detail without being overstuffed. He knows when to speed up the pace, when to make us linger in a tense or moody moment. On every page, O’Donnell is having so much fun with language, and he is brilliant at using dialogue to build the characters and distinguish them from each other. As noted above, Cutter loves to mock Bliss’s polite, overly elaborate way of speaking, but he has sharp words for everyone. For her part, blithe Octavia Hillingdon isn’t bothered by Cutter’s verbal slashes, and she parries deftly.
They do all this talking in an assortment of atmospheric settings, including an orchid house, “a private establishment . . . providing gentlemanly entertainments,” and the grounds of the orphanage where the devastating fire occurred. Many of these settings are the crime scenes, which brings us to the murders themselves. These are certainly more graphically rendered, if not more gruesome, than any murder I can recall in a 19th-century novel. Readers as delicate as Gideon Bliss may find the descriptions of the victims a bit nauseating, but I suspect modern mystery readers won’t be much bothered.
Nor do I suspect readers will find the plot twists especially complicated or surprising. O’Donnell’s mysteries aren’t the sort that gobsmack you with countless shocking reveals. Instead, like the previous Bliss and Cutter novel, The Naming of the Birds gradually illuminates the depths of the evil done by a cabal of men who mercilessly use the poor and—to use a Victorian term—the friendless, many of them female. Powerful men exploiting women and children: it’s a story old as dirt and, unfortunately, as enduring.
For many chapters, Bliss suspects Cutter knows more than he’s letting on, and gradually, Bliss becomes frustrated by Cutter’s withholding. To a certain extent, so did I. The knowledge Cutter keeps to himself until Part 3 of the novel could have been interesting to have earlier on. Had O’Donnell chosen to reveal Cutter’s secret sooner, we might’ve felt more fully the inspector’s quandary about the difficult choice he must make in the end.
Still, The Naming of the Birds delivers creepy vibes, spiky jibes, and memorable characters. Here’s hoping there are more adventures of Bliss, Cutter, and Hillingdon to come.
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