hotel3alpha
Command Sergeant Major
- Joined
- May 24, 2013
- Messages
- 2,055
All,
So...I went to the book store earlier this month and said to my self..."self, find a book title that jumps out at you and buy it" and I did. I picked up this book at the Half Price Book store and gave it a read. Well, was I in for a treat as I knew nothing about the Author, story of premise. So here is the teaser as written by Patrick MacGrath of The New York times:
“The Thing About Thugs” is an odd confection of a novel, set mostly in what looks like late-Victorian London. The streets are gaslit. The underworld teems with the flotsam of empire: lascars, Irishmen and so on, the undesirables of many nations. The city is overwhelmed with crime and prostitution and an influx of immigrants. Opium dens abound. And a serial killer is on the loose. Known as the “head cannibal,” he decapitates his victims after murdering them, but the heads are never found. The Metropolitan Police are baffled, as they were by Jack the Ripper, active in 1888, who also desecrated the bodies of his victims. Meanwhile, characters with names like One-Eyed Jack make shady deals in low taverns, and at the dinner tables of the upper classes Darwinian ideas are hotly debated. It feels as if we’re in the disillusioned twilight of the 19th century, but our narrator — or one of our narrators — sitting in his grandfather’s library “surrounded by Dickens and Collins,” claims that his story is set in 1837, the year Victoria ascended to the throne.
After reading the book, I have to agree with some of the other online reviews that at the beginning you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to establish who is telling the story-as there are various narrators. To be frank, I did get lost a few times trying to weave together the characters who are speaking or who are being spoken too. Khair will stop you in your reading tracks by beginning the next chapter with a completely new narrative by a different character. However, midway through the book you begin to get the rhythm of the tale and before you know it you are in the midst of reading a thriller.
The history behind the Thugee clans in India was a new revelation in history to me and now I fully understand where the term "thug" came from. I had no idea about these bands of faux travelers who befriended other travelers through a confidence scheme. The Thugee bands would travel for days with their "marks" picking up other "travelers" along the way who were also apart of the Thugee clan in disguise. When the time was right and the conditions were good (for cold blooded murder) they would signal to each other in code then strangle, rob and bury their fellow travelers with out a sound. There was no prejudice in their killings as women and children were fair game as well. This was their work...this is what they did to make a living...and had zero feeling about it. It was literally "A Thug Life".
All in all, it was somewhat a frustrating read (at the beginning) but I forgave the author midway through as we started to get in the meat and potatoes of the story. When it began to read like a Agatha Christie novel I looked forward to picking up where I left off. It was a good book and I recommend it, however it demands a heck of a lot more patience in reading that I am used to. So, is it in my "Top Ten of All Time"? No, but for a moment in time I was in the Streets of Old London, frightfully witnessing innocent travelers meet a dreadful death by way of strangulation and putting together pieces of a story clipped out of old English newspaper headlines.
John from Texas
So...I went to the book store earlier this month and said to my self..."self, find a book title that jumps out at you and buy it" and I did. I picked up this book at the Half Price Book store and gave it a read. Well, was I in for a treat as I knew nothing about the Author, story of premise. So here is the teaser as written by Patrick MacGrath of The New York times:
“The Thing About Thugs” is an odd confection of a novel, set mostly in what looks like late-Victorian London. The streets are gaslit. The underworld teems with the flotsam of empire: lascars, Irishmen and so on, the undesirables of many nations. The city is overwhelmed with crime and prostitution and an influx of immigrants. Opium dens abound. And a serial killer is on the loose. Known as the “head cannibal,” he decapitates his victims after murdering them, but the heads are never found. The Metropolitan Police are baffled, as they were by Jack the Ripper, active in 1888, who also desecrated the bodies of his victims. Meanwhile, characters with names like One-Eyed Jack make shady deals in low taverns, and at the dinner tables of the upper classes Darwinian ideas are hotly debated. It feels as if we’re in the disillusioned twilight of the 19th century, but our narrator — or one of our narrators — sitting in his grandfather’s library “surrounded by Dickens and Collins,” claims that his story is set in 1837, the year Victoria ascended to the throne.
After reading the book, I have to agree with some of the other online reviews that at the beginning you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to establish who is telling the story-as there are various narrators. To be frank, I did get lost a few times trying to weave together the characters who are speaking or who are being spoken too. Khair will stop you in your reading tracks by beginning the next chapter with a completely new narrative by a different character. However, midway through the book you begin to get the rhythm of the tale and before you know it you are in the midst of reading a thriller.
The history behind the Thugee clans in India was a new revelation in history to me and now I fully understand where the term "thug" came from. I had no idea about these bands of faux travelers who befriended other travelers through a confidence scheme. The Thugee bands would travel for days with their "marks" picking up other "travelers" along the way who were also apart of the Thugee clan in disguise. When the time was right and the conditions were good (for cold blooded murder) they would signal to each other in code then strangle, rob and bury their fellow travelers with out a sound. There was no prejudice in their killings as women and children were fair game as well. This was their work...this is what they did to make a living...and had zero feeling about it. It was literally "A Thug Life".
All in all, it was somewhat a frustrating read (at the beginning) but I forgave the author midway through as we started to get in the meat and potatoes of the story. When it began to read like a Agatha Christie novel I looked forward to picking up where I left off. It was a good book and I recommend it, however it demands a heck of a lot more patience in reading that I am used to. So, is it in my "Top Ten of All Time"? No, but for a moment in time I was in the Streets of Old London, frightfully witnessing innocent travelers meet a dreadful death by way of strangulation and putting together pieces of a story clipped out of old English newspaper headlines.
John from Texas