Thereby hangs a tale

David Sexton

DAN LENO AND THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM

The key to all Peter Ackroyd's work has unaccountably been omitted from the impressive list of his publications which preceeds this novel.

Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession, was published by Thames and Hudson in 1979, before Ack- royd had begun his career as a novelist. A knowledgeable and enthusiastic survey of cross-dressing in all its aspects, it includes, among its many alarming illustrations, a photograph of the great music-hall artist and pantomime dame, Dan Leno, in drag, grimacing horribly and about to drop a curtsey.

In the accompanying text, Ackroyd bor- rows an observation from Max Beerbohm, to the effect that transvestism on stage only works well one way round.

The male impersonator, the actress in

trousers, seem . to lack depth and reso- nance The female impersonator, on the other hand, has more dramatic presence — the idea of a male mind and body under- neath a female costume evokes memories and fears to which laughter is the best reac- tion.

Fifteen years later, Ackroyd has returned to this conundrum and to the fig- ure of Leno. In a television lecture last December, 'London Luminaries and Cock- ney Visionaries', he aligned himself direct- ly with this 'funniest man on earth', who died young, worn out by his life in the halls and on the pantomime stage, dazzled by his alcoholism and insanity.

Leno had, Ackroyd observed, played Mother Goose just once too often. Yet — or perhaps therefore? — he remains Ack- royd's soulmate.

I think that this great chronicler of the streets and trades and cries of London would have understood perfectly everything I have tried to say

he maintained.

Now he has incorporated this chosen precursor into a transvestite murder mys- tery. In 1881, Elizabeth Cree is hanged at Camberwell Prison, for the poisoning of her husband. In her youth she had been a music-hall protégé of Leno's, appearing in drag as 'the Elder Brother'.

In the six months before her death, Lon- don has been terrorized by a series of grue- some killings, so fiendish that they are attributed by the papers to a supernatural force, the `Limehouse Golem'. Various sus- pects are interviewed by the police during the course of the novel, including Karl Marx, George Gissing and Leno himself. Meanwhile, Ackroyd has his usual high old time fixing up spooky coincidences. At one moment he arranges for 'Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and George Gissing' to all enter the Reading Room of the British Library 'within the space of an hour'. At another, Dan Leno unwittingly saves the life of the yet 'unborn infant', Charlie Chaplin.

Interspersed with these chapters is what appears to be the diary of the killer, John Cree, glorying in his bloody crimes. The reader thus has the impression that he knows the identity of the guilty man all along. Naturally, this confidence is shaken before the end. There has been a little more cross-dressing going on than has been admitted: literary as well as actual transvestism.

Though little suspense is created, Ack- royd manages these parallel narratives expertly. He has, you realize, done this kind of thing before. He has also insisted before, as he rather wearingly does here, on the circularity of time, the way 'every- thing is related' and le mort saisit le vif.

As a whole family is about to be diced, the murderer piously observes:

They were about to become patterns of eter- nity and in their own wounds reflect the inflictions of recurrent time.

Ackroyd has expressed some such occult belief himself often enough, and not just through his novels (which all turn on it). In the 'Cockney Visionaries' lecture he instructed his audience:

We must not think of time as some continu- ally flowing stream moving in one direction. Think of it more as a lava flow from some unknown source of fire. Some parts of it move forward, some parts of it branch off and form separate channels, some parts of it slow down and eventually harden. There are parts of London, I believe, where time has actually hardened and come to an end .. . It is as if the past and present were locked in an embrace, like lovers.

'Here we are again!' says Elizabeth Cree as she is hanged, at the start of the book. 'Here we are again!' says Dan Leno, after another hanging, at the finish. Here we are again, say all of Ackroyd's readers, from beginning to end.

Ackroyd has explained his endlessly revenant style, his love of pastiche, taking on the mantle of Wilde, Hawksmoor or Dr John Dee, in terms of this occult theory:

We can live only in the present, but the past is absorbed within that present so that all previous moments exist concurrently in every present moment. Language made our world and our language now contains its own com- plete history. . .

But perhaps the real explanation is sim- pler. It's all just 'a bit of a game en traveste, as the murderer says here. Ackroyd likes nothing better than to get some kit on and cut a caper. As the murderer puts it, surely speaking for him,

it was enough for me to imagine myself dancing upon the stage with the beautiful picture of London behind me.

He just loves to feel all London's past com- ing up behind him.

Hence the curiously ineffectual tone of his horror stories. Ackroyd may believe with his murderer that 'horror is the true sublime'. But laughter seems a better reac- tion to his get-ups than fear, just as Eliza- beth Cree is not frightened of the judge who sentences her.

He looked, she thought, like Pantaloon in the pantomime. No, he was too florid and too fat. He was good for nothing except a Dame part.