Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings" by Jonathan Raban
A stunning account of a sea voyage, and a rare book set in the outdoors that isn't about a disaster.
By Scott Sutherland
[10/26/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Could I have been any more inept?
First I fell for my wife's friend. Then I put it in writing. Now my life is sheer hell.
By Garrison Keillor
[10/26/99]

Book Bag
Strictly Southern
The author of "Sophie's Choice" picks five great contemporary Southern novels.
By William Styron
[10/25/99]

Ivory Tower
Welcome back, Lewis
"The New New Thing" author once said J-school ate his brain. Guess where he's teaching now.
By Alex Salkever
[10/25/99]

Reviews
"Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies" by Ken Kalfus
In his new collection, the author of the kaleidoscopic "Thirst" focuses on a single setting -- Russia.
By Laura Miller
[10/25/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Subtitled "Being a Melodrama in 16 Parts," "From Hell" takes on the most notorious unsolved mystery in the annals of crime, the 1888 "Jack the Ripper" killings of five prostitutes in London's East End. But Moore is more excited by history than he is by any horror show. In his introduction to the series, Moore wrote "It's my belief that if you cut into a thing deeply enough, if your incisions are precise and persistent and conducted methodically, then you may reveal not only that thing's inner workings, but also the meaning behind those workings ... 'From Hell' is a post-mortem of a historical occurrence, using fiction as a scalpel."

Open "From Hell" and you may involuntarily draw back -- it feels like the dark, sooty atmosphere of Moore and Campbell's Victorian London could seep into your own living room. Campbell renders "From Hell" in a scratchy, drippy black and white, with each panel seemingly drawn using a blend of London's chimney ash and tabloid ink. With no campy sound effect balloons, "From Hell" unfolds in an eerie silence, its pauses worthy of Harold Pinter. Although it's still a suspense-driven thriller, "From Hell" condemns the urban destitution and the maltreatment of women of the time in the starkest possible terms, with Moore and Campbell peering into the darkest corners of the victims' squalid lives.

Inspired by the Ripper's centennial, Moore found himself sucked into the lore of "Ripperology," where wild suppositions and fierce factions rival the theorists of the Kennedy assassination. "Watchmen" is replete with Pynchonesque paranoia, and "From Hell" posits a similarly complex conspiracy at the heart of the slayings. Inspired by "Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution" by the late Stephen Knight, "From Hell" suggests that Prince Albert "Eddy" Victor had fathered an illegitimate child, and when four Whitechapel prostitutes attempted to exploit this information, they were executed (the fifth victim was allegedly a case of mistaken identity). Complicit parties include Scotland Yard, the Freemasons and Victoria herself, while such London notables as Oscar Wilde and James "Elephant Man" Merrick make cameo appearances.

For the killer, Moore's finger falls on Sir William Withey Gull, Victoria's royal physician. Though Gull was in his 70s in 1888 and had suffered a stroke, he had the surgical skill deemed necessary to commit the crimes. But throughout the book, Moore maintains that he's more concerned with creating a tapestry of the era than unmasking a suspect, and that "From Hell" is not so much a "whodunnit" as a "wha' happen." In his own afterward, Campbell admits his belief in Gull's innocence, but his pen depicts the top-hatted Gull and his shadowy, horse-drawn carriage as indelible images of doom.

You can read "From Hell" as a police procedural as it follows Scotland Yard's Inspector Abberline through the case, but Moore's larger point is that the Ripper murders were the fullest expression of 19th century injustices and hypocrisies. In one scene, reflecting the epidemic of fake "Jack the Ripper" letters at the time, Victorian men from all walks of life -- a clergyman in his study, a laborer in a tub, two teenaged boys staying up late -- are shown to be writing confessional letters to the police, grisly missives that flow together as if they're the same letter.

Moore emphasizes the disparity between society's highest and lowest members by using his signature juxtapositions, in which the dialogue or background details of one scene comment on another. (Think of the baptism scene intercut with images of Mob hits at the end of "The Godfather.") Most of Chapter 7 alternates between Gull and the second victim, Annie Chapman, on the last day of her life, a telling contrast of privilege and poverty. While Gull arises from a luxurious bed, Chapman awakens in a seedy flophouse, sleeping along the same bench with other destitute women.

Next page | The sordid lives of Victorian streetwalkers