The Pale Blue Eye
Two years ago, I quite enjoyed Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy, so I was looking forward to his most recent novel, The Pale Blue Eye (2006). While Mr. Timothy is a sequel of sorts to A Christmas Carol, The Pale Blue Eye adopts a different (albeit familiar) strategy: its narrator, Augustus Landor, joins up with a youthful Edgar Allan Poe to investigate multiple murders--not to mention missing hearts--at a rather beleaguered West Point. "Landor" isn't an allusion to the poet--he owns a cottage. ("Augustus," however, is probably a nod in the direction of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and perhaps C. Auguste Dupin as well.) In the manner of Sherlock Holmes pastiche, the novel thus writes a promised but unwritten Poe story, rather than rewrites an extant text. Along the way, we read a poem that isn't "The Raven," stumble across some situations vaguely reminiscent of "The Tell-Tale Heart" (including, of course, the title, which here appears in the aforementioned non-"Raven"), and meet a suspiciously House-of-Usherish family. In other words, Bayard imagines the novel's events as fictional biographical precursors of Poe's own tales, grounding them in "reality" instead of the Gothic, Freudian psychology, or however else one might choose to interpret them.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for Mr. Timothy singularly failed to carry over to this newest venture. First and foremost was the question of style. As in Mr. Timothy, Bayard usually avoids writing cod nineteenth-century prose; Landor frequently addresses his "Reader," in a manner more akin to Jane Eyre than Poe's narrators, but that's about it. If only Bayard had shown similar restraint with Poe. Alas, the reader is subjected to considerable quantities of faux Poe--and very faux it is indeed. It's hard not to giggle when confronted with effusions like this: "Lea. Lea! What a ravishing residue does that name deposit within my ear's inner chamber! What a world of happiness is foretold within those two brief and euphonious syllables!" (209) Bayard's ersatz Poe primarily relies on multisyllabic words, vaguely stilted sentence structures, an occasional slide into alliteration, and literary allusions; there's little sign of the real Poe's rhythmic sense, his use of apposition and repetition, and the like. Since Bayard modernizes Landor's prose but not Poe's, the overall effect feels even more jarring, as if the two characters had accidentally stumbled into each other from different novels and decided to collaborate.
The plotting, however, is just as problematic. While I plead guilty to thinking sometimes uncomplimentary thoughts about historical mysteries, the "historical" element is not the difficulty here--it's the "mystery" bit. Since I'm about to reveal the ending, the rest of this essay will go below the fold.
Mr. Timothy was occasionally beset by mystery cliches, but The Pale Blue Eye positively swarms with them. There's the Rundown Ex-Cop with Personal Motives, the Earnest Sidekick, the Discursive Explanation While the Suspects Do Nothing, and so forth. The plot that locks all of these elements together, however, isn't out of Poe--it's out of Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, to be precise. But unlike Christie, who had plotting down to an exact science, Bayard ornaments and inflates his narrative; Landor tricks us more by red herrings than by artful omission. The revelation of Landor's guilt and motive feels clumsy. Looking back over the novel in retrospect, the reader can see some points where Landor has clearly misdirected us, but in other instances, the case is fuzzier. Moreover, given Poe, one would expect a more...outrageous? insane?...narrator, but Landor exhibits only run-of-the-mill (and perfectly understandable) vengefulness. Faux Poe at one end, insufficient Poe at the other. A bit more of Patrick McGrath's spirit might have been in order.
This is not to say that there's nothing worthwhile about the novel. <; Near the end, Landor tells Poe that "I can do business with a poet all right. But not with a liar" (323), and the novel implicitly dwells on the fine line between storytelling and lying, real and poetic truths. (It is perhaps less successful when dealing with the imagination; Poe believes that his poems are being "dictated" to him by spirits, but as I noted above, the novel proposes a much more banal, biographical explanation.) And Bayard also devotes considerable space to the perils and promises of memory, which becomes as much of a threat as a haven. But I fear that the novel overall failed to live up to the promise of Bayard's previous work on nineteenth-century ground.