By Paul Carrier
Fifteen years ago, Matthew Pearl released his debut novel, The Dante Club, a chilling tale about a fictional series of gruesome murders in 19th-century Boston inspired by the hellish punishments in Dante’s Inferno, part of the Divine Comedy. Boston luminaries Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, who are working on the first American translation of the Comedy, set out to nab the killer.
Pearl has written several novels since then, all with historical settings. Now he renews his focus on Dante with The Dante Chamber, a sequel of sorts to the The Dante Club that changes the setting from Boston to London.
It’s 1869, or thereabouts, and a member of Parliament dies with a heavy stone attached to his neck, reminiscent of one of the punishments described in Purgatory, a section of the Divine Comedy. In short order, an opera singer dies as well, again in Dante-esque fashion with her eyes sewn shut.
Both deaths occur in public, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an eccentric, real-life British artist, poet and translator preoccupied with the medieval Italian writer, appears to have witnessed them. In Pearl’s telling, Rossetti’s Italian-born father was so obsessed with Dante that it seems to have driven him mad. His son is not far behind.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti quickly disappears following the macabre deaths, leaving no clues in his disorganized home as to whether he is a killer, a potential victim, or merely an innocent bystander who has gone off on some quirky adventure entirely unrelated to the deaths.
Several literary lights band together to find the missing artist, whose disappearance they assume is somehow linked to the apparent murders. They include the artist’s sister, poet Christina Rossetti; and fellow poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Holmes, a poet and physician (and father of the Supreme Court justice), is traveling in Europe at the time; he plays a major role in the plot as well. The stakes grow as the death toll mounts, in each case with an obvious parallel to Dante’s masterpiece.
Pearl does a fine job of portraying Tennyson, Browning and Holmes as flesh-and-blood characters rather than mere icons, but he is especially insightful in describing the complex psyche and reclusive nature of Christina Rossetti, the youngest of four children in a famed family.
For added spice, Pearl throws in a dogged police inspector, Adolphus “Dolly” Williamson, who suspects that Dante Gabriel Rossetti is behind the macabre deaths; and Simon Camp, an unscrupulous pamphleteer and former Pinkerton detective from Boston who arrives in London convinced that the murders will prove to be a moneymaker for him.
Several of Pearl's novels have focused on literary figures, including The Last Dickens (Charles Dickens), The Last Bookaneer (Robert Louis Stevenson) and The Poe Shadow (Edgar Allan Poe). But he seems to have a particular fascination with Dante. Pearl won a prize from the Dante Society of America in 1998, several years before he released The Dante Club. And he has edited an edition of Dante’s Inferno.
It’s possible to enjoy The Dante Chamber without being a serious student of Dante and his work, but being an ardent admirer probably is a plus. Pearl allows his scholarship and his apparent devotion to Dante to get the best of him from time to time. The novel posits that Dante could have developed a quasi-religious following in the 19th century because some admirers supposedly believed that he offered a metaphysical perspective on life that would be the key to nothing less than the imminent salvation of mankind.
As Pearl points out in an author’s note, “cultlike collectives” were common on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century. Still, the fictional group Pearl describes in The Dante Chamber may strike some 21st-century readers as too far-fetched and esoteric to be remotely plausible, even by Victorian standards. It's goofy stuff.
Pearl has written several novels since then, all with historical settings. Now he renews his focus on Dante with The Dante Chamber, a sequel of sorts to the The Dante Club that changes the setting from Boston to London.
It’s 1869, or thereabouts, and a member of Parliament dies with a heavy stone attached to his neck, reminiscent of one of the punishments described in Purgatory, a section of the Divine Comedy. In short order, an opera singer dies as well, again in Dante-esque fashion with her eyes sewn shut.
Both deaths occur in public, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an eccentric, real-life British artist, poet and translator preoccupied with the medieval Italian writer, appears to have witnessed them. In Pearl’s telling, Rossetti’s Italian-born father was so obsessed with Dante that it seems to have driven him mad. His son is not far behind.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti quickly disappears following the macabre deaths, leaving no clues in his disorganized home as to whether he is a killer, a potential victim, or merely an innocent bystander who has gone off on some quirky adventure entirely unrelated to the deaths.
Several literary lights band together to find the missing artist, whose disappearance they assume is somehow linked to the apparent murders. They include the artist’s sister, poet Christina Rossetti; and fellow poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Holmes, a poet and physician (and father of the Supreme Court justice), is traveling in Europe at the time; he plays a major role in the plot as well. The stakes grow as the death toll mounts, in each case with an obvious parallel to Dante’s masterpiece.
Pearl does a fine job of portraying Tennyson, Browning and Holmes as flesh-and-blood characters rather than mere icons, but he is especially insightful in describing the complex psyche and reclusive nature of Christina Rossetti, the youngest of four children in a famed family.
For added spice, Pearl throws in a dogged police inspector, Adolphus “Dolly” Williamson, who suspects that Dante Gabriel Rossetti is behind the macabre deaths; and Simon Camp, an unscrupulous pamphleteer and former Pinkerton detective from Boston who arrives in London convinced that the murders will prove to be a moneymaker for him.
Several of Pearl's novels have focused on literary figures, including The Last Dickens (Charles Dickens), The Last Bookaneer (Robert Louis Stevenson) and The Poe Shadow (Edgar Allan Poe). But he seems to have a particular fascination with Dante. Pearl won a prize from the Dante Society of America in 1998, several years before he released The Dante Club. And he has edited an edition of Dante’s Inferno.
It’s possible to enjoy The Dante Chamber without being a serious student of Dante and his work, but being an ardent admirer probably is a plus. Pearl allows his scholarship and his apparent devotion to Dante to get the best of him from time to time. The novel posits that Dante could have developed a quasi-religious following in the 19th century because some admirers supposedly believed that he offered a metaphysical perspective on life that would be the key to nothing less than the imminent salvation of mankind.
As Pearl points out in an author’s note, “cultlike collectives” were common on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century. Still, the fictional group Pearl describes in The Dante Chamber may strike some 21st-century readers as too far-fetched and esoteric to be remotely plausible, even by Victorian standards. It's goofy stuff.
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