Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln...
Historical fiction is one of my favorite
literary genres, when it’s done well. The spinning nature of time is never
better appreciated than when one sees a page from our past come into focus as
if for the first time.
A thoughtful fictional treatment can lend a fresh and
divergent perspective on what has become well-trod ground.
But when historical fiction is done badly, it makes for a rough trudge. Take this story set in the United States after the Civil War, centering on the mystery surrounding the country’s first presidential assassination. As fiction, as history, as action-adventure, the novel fails so badly as to defy reason.
It’s just weeks after the shocking
murder of Abraham Lincoln. In a crowded Washington, D. C. railway station, city
police detective Temple McFadden sees a low-level criminal of his acquaintance
suddenly attacked and killed. Rushing to his aid, Temple finds a pair of
diaries on the victim’s body, one belonging to Lincoln’s widow, the other to the assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
These diaries are very much wanted by the killers, who will stop at nothing
to get them.
As Allan Pinkerton, the noted detective
and one of several real-life figures in the novel, puts it to McFadden’s
devoted wife, Fiona: “Your husband still doesn’t recognize what surrounds him…I
have men all over the District. Your husband can’t get far without being
sighted, and what he is secreting is far, far beyond him.”
At the core of the story is the
real-life mystery about John Wilkes Booth’s diary. When the journal of
Lincoln’s murderer was re-discovered years after Booth’s own death, a number of
pages had been torn out. Speculation has wandered in many directions, including
the possibility that it was the work of Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s own Secretary
of War, hiding evidence of his own complicity in the president’s murder. Others
have also been suspected of involvement in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln,
beyond those who were charged as Booth’s accomplices in 1865.
Everyone loves a conspiracy; a novel about
one would seem delicious. Unfortunately, O’Brien doesn’t have much to offer,
neither as historical conjecture nor as a straight-ahead mystery. Even as a simple
thriller, it fails to thrill.
The action comes off excessively forced
right away. Once Temple takes custody of the journals and makes his way outside
the B & O Railroad station, the bad guys are in immediate hot pursuit,
shooting at him as he gallops on a stolen horse through crowded city streets,
a sequence that goes on and on.
Finding a group of soldiers outside the U. S. Treasury building just as his mount is struck and killed, Temple flashes his
badge, whereupon the “gents” (as the pursuers are called, because of their
crisp white shirts and tailored black coats) immediately start a gun battle
with the soldiers.
You expect the chase to end there. But
these gents prove unstoppable killing machines. So Temple must keep moving, on
another stolen mount, across several city blocks, gents hard on his hooves, until
in the first of many sudden dei ex machinis
O’Brien throws up in lieu of plot, Temple is rescued by another group led by
Pinkerton. Pinkerton wants the diaries, too, for his own suspect ends, and is
frustrated when he discovers Temple had the presence of mind to hide them
somewhere in the middle of his escape.
The gents, we later learn, are led by
Lafayette Baker, a historical figure who had charge of the Booth manhunt and
was Stanton’s head of secret police. Baker, we learn at once, is cruel
and vicious. “He enjoys killing,” Temple registers right away.
That’s pretty much the whole story
regarding Baker, though O’Brien belabors it. At one point, we leave Temple’s
point-of-view to see Baker go to an Army camp and summon forth a young corporal
he saw helping Temple at the train station. After luring him to an alley, Baker
murders the kid out of spite.
Two questions: Why would Baker risk such
an excessive atrocity, being as there are soldiers all around and a possibility
he might be recognized if not caught in the act? More important, a few chapters before we read that Baker shot the corporal at the train station, where he lay
“lifeless.” Did O’Brien forget he killed him already? Or are we to believe the
guy reported for duty somehow after being gravely wounded, and didn’t recognize
his shooter?
This is of a piece with a lack of
seriousness, either intentional or not, that runs through the pages of this ridiculous book. The more I read it, the more I pondered the notion
this was meant as a parody, only the humor was never put in.
The book’s core relationship is
between Temple and Fiona, who because Temple has a limp, calls him a “police defective.”
This passes for affectionate humor between the lovebirds, whose romance further
weighs down our story.
We meet Fiona in the U. S. Patent
Office, where she is helping a doctor with his surgeries, and pointing out the
flaws of his work in a way meant to show her independent frame of mind but which
comes off stiff and anachronistic.
“May I remind you that I am a doctor and
that you are here to assist me?” says the doctor after much badinage.
“Of course you may, Dr. Springer,
though, as I’m sure you know, I am a graduate of Syracuse Medical College.”
That’ll learn the sexist! She makes a
point of leaving on a carriage with her friend Augustus Spriggs, a black man
whose codebreaking skills come in handy as the novel develops. At this
particular moment, Augustus’s purpose is to give Fiona something else to shock
Dr. Springer with, being seen in daylight in the company of a Negro.
Racism is a big theme of The Lincoln Conspiracy, something which
made me decide it was not meant as a parody. But even here, O’Brien can’t help
but push the envelope of the ridiculous. Augustus brings up a lot of grievances
that may seem on point now but a little ahead of events, considering a bloody war
to end slavery has just been fought. For example, there’s a new college being
constructed in the city for freedmen, but why, Augustus asks, is it being named
after a white general named Howard rather than Frederick Douglass?
“You live in a white house, Augustus,”
Temple observes, for no particular reason except setting his friend up for one
of his socially-aware zingers.
“Unlike the President’s House, mine
wasn’t built with the help of slaves,” Augustus answers.
Moments like this made me feel like I
was anywhere but in the 19th century reading The Lincoln Conspiracy.
The nub of the story is worthy, and
would have been interesting in better hands than O’Brien’s. The Booth diary’s
missing pages (it has never been clear how many were ripped from the book) has given rise to many theories. One wonders for a while what O’Brien
will do with this.
 |
| The diary of John Wilkes Booth as it appears on display at Ford's Theatre, site of the assassination. One can see where pages were torn from the binding. [Image from http://rogerjnorton.com/Lincoln52.html] |
Very little, as it turns out. The keys
to uncovering the Lincoln conspiracy, such as it is, lie elsewhere, in
coded messages and photographs taken of Booth’s body which Temple’s photographer
friend, Alexander Gardner (another historical figure) just happens to have on
hand and is happy to give to Temple. Many people seem happy to help Temple out
in this book, even a few who start out enemies, for reasons that are
ill-explained and cry out plot convenience.
I haven’t even gotten to the worst part
of The Lincoln Conspiracy; how O’Brien
trowels on his research in the guise of casual conversations among his
characters. When Temple asks Gardner about a cigar the photographer is smoking,
Gardner launches into a long disquisition about a Civil War general, Daniel
Sickles, who gave him the cigars, how Sickles was once arrested for shooting
the son of Francis Scott Key, and how Sickles was seriously wounded at the
battle of Gettysburg.
Conversations like this crop up
throughout the novel, of the sort you might expect if you were the type who got
into casual conversations about say, terrorism or climate change while asking a
mechanic to repair your car. If there’s a point O’Brien wishes to make about
something he perhaps spotted browsing through Wikipedia, he finds a way of
inserting it into his story, no matter how much he grinds the gears in doing
so.
I haven’t even gotten to the ending,
where the novel really falls apart. I try to avoid spoilers, but it’s tempting
here since there’s nothing to spoil. Suffice it to say that history goes out
the window as Temple confronts the real force behind Lincoln’s murder, a
character who wasn’t even mentioned for most of the novel, is unknown to
history, and only appears at the end. To call him a supervillain in the Bond
mold seems unfair to Ian Fleming, who gave his Blofelds and Goldfingers something
in the way of depth missing here. When we discover the character has a blade in
place of a hand, my parody sensors began buzzing again, but the denouement is otherwise
pushed in the direction of action-adventure, not comedy. I think O’Brien was
really going for a big Hollywood ending.
There was to have been another novel; my
paperback edition comes with a sample chapter from it, involving Temple working
on a murder case in New York. But no mention of this novel appears on O’Brien’s
website; it seems a lack of public enthusiasm has curtailed the series after one
installment.
O’Brien, his biography tells us, cuts
quite the figure in today’s world, as publisher of Bloomberg View and former
executive editor of the Huffington Post. He seems quite at home in the 21st
century; my advice is that he stay there.
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