Luis Vazquez/Gulf News

Golden Hill

By Francis Spufford, Faber & Faber, 352 pages, £17

 

There is a tricky and perhaps dubious kind of suspense in fiction that depends on withholding information from the reader even though it is known to the protagonist. It can be a simple device to keep the pages turning in an action thriller — the hero puts some objects in his car boot, but you’ll have to read the next chapter to find out how he plans to use them to defeat the bad guys. Or it can be the mystery behind a whole book, which may depict all sorts of thoughts in the central character’s consciousness — except his secret purpose, withheld until the end.

Such is the epistemological structure of Francis Spufford’s splendidly entertaining and ingenious first novel, and it certainly helps to propel the reader forward. A young man from London, Mr Smith, arrives in New York in 1746 with a bill of exchange to the enormous value of £1,000. It is to be honoured within 60 days by a trader, Lovell, who owes this amount to the London company that wrote the bill. But who exactly is Smith? And what does he intend to do with his fortune?

The novel won’t tell us until the very final pages. Opinions will differ about whether this is acceptable manipulation or just cheating. But then fiction is cheating to begin with — a fact often remarked upon by the novels of the 18th century that invented the modern form. In Spufford’s acknowledgments he describes the book as “a colonial counterpart to Joseph Andrews or David Simple”, the novels by Henry and Sarah Fielding, and in “Golden Hill”’s picaresque tale of the travails of an ingénu he has produced a loving tribute to the literature of that era.

Through Smith’s eyes we are introduced to a colourfully mistrustful Manhattan social elite, through which our hero stumbles with lovable clumsiness. It is a small world, 18th-century New York being 10 times less populous than London (and, as the narrator memorably describes, considerably less smelly), though happily Smith can still indulge his admirably serious coffee habit. Through the coffeehouses and other talking shops the scuttlebutt soon spreads that Smith is “a Saracen conjuror, and quite possibly an agent of the French”.

To say too much about what happens while he is waiting for his bill to be honoured would be invidious, but suffice to say that Mr Smith develops a healthy interest in one of Lovell’s daughters, Tabitha, and she in him: they compare their own flirtatious sparring with that of Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”. (Tabitha does not think much of novels: “Slush for small minds, sir. Pabulum for the easily pleased.”)

Smith also finds a key ally in the marvellous character of Septimus Oakeshott, secretary to the governor and secretly the admirer of his boss’s slave, Achilles. (The governor himself “had a massive and statuesque Roman head [...] like a slightly depraved but very intelligent emperor”.) The frolicsome story takes in, too, a feast, a performance of a play (Addison’s “Cato”), and a visit to the town jail.

But enough of mere incident. The third-person narrative voice, in era-appropriate style, is the book’s great comic triumph. Lovell is introduced early on as a man “to whom few things retain’d the force of novelty, and who misliked extremely the sensation when they did”. The novelist is also an 18th-century character, who remarks upon the work of contemporaries such as Sterne, and who on three increasingly funny occasions despairs of being able to describe a particular scene when its understanding depends on a clear idea of the rules and technical vocabulary of a particular activity.

When Smith sits down to an obscure species of card game, the exposition becomes more and more amusingly unfollowable until the narrator gives up: “alas the explanation is bungled, but it cannot be recalled and started over again, for the game has begun [...] Still, the reader may now find himself in as bemused a position as Mr Smith; which is, to be sure, a kind of gain in understanding.”

Later on, the same thing happens during a duel: “The truth is, that I am obliged to copy these names for sword-fighting out of a book, having no direct experience to call upon. I throw myself upon the reader’s mercy, or rather their sense of resignation.”

This “their” is an excellent pedants’ trap with relevance to today’s arguments over gender-neutral pronouns: we are accustomed to think it was overwhelmingly the rule in past ages to use “his” to mean “his or her”, but in fact singular “they” was quite common in literary usage until the late 18th century. The whole line, of course, is also a joke about the historical novelist’s method of finding things out from books. Throughout “Golden Hill”, Spufford creates vivid, painterly scenes of street and salon life, yet one never feels as though a historical detail has been inserted just because he knew about it. (One may contrast, for example, Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle”, for all its intermittent brilliance.) Here is deep research worn refreshingly lightly. Sense is never harmed by a fanatical disdain for linguistic anachronism, and the odd piece of period punctuation practice (a colon followed by a dash), or the restrained use of the Capitalisation of Nouns (only in letters sent by one character to another), sketch verbal atmosphere without undue alienation.

The whole thing, then, is a first-class period entertainment, until at length it becomes something more serious. The comedy gives way to darker tones, and Smith’s secret is at last revealed — but the novel, most pleasingly, still has one more trick up its sleeve.

–Guardian News & Media Ltd