A Brutal Chill in August: A Novel of Polly Nichols, The First Victim of Jack the Ripper - Softcover

ALAN M. CLARK, an author and illustrator, grew up in Tennessee in a house full of bones and old medical books. He is the author of seventeen published books, including ten novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. As a visual artist, he has created illustrations for hundreds of books, including works of fiction of various genres, nonfiction, textbooks, young adult fiction, and children's books. Awards for his work include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon.

Ripperologist Magazine Fiction ReviewsAlan M. Clark's new novel tells the story of Polly Nichols. It was published yesterday, on August 30, exactly 128 years to the day that Polly met her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper in the early hours of the following morning. A Brutal Chill in August is in part a lament and a commemoration of Polly's life, and in part an attempt to explore the world in which she grew up and struggled to survive. Like the earlier volumes in the author's Jack the Ripper Victims series, it is a bold, rather daring work of fiction that finds value in the lives of people usually overlooked by history. I think we have to go back to Pat Barker's 1984 novel Blow Your House Down (a book that shares many of the same concerns as A Brutal Chill) to find a work of comparable power and significance.

Desperation and hardship hang over every page and every character, as they must in a novel that takes East End life, and particularly the plight of a Victorian working class woman, as its central theme. We first encounter Polly during the Great Stink of 1858. She and her childhood friends are scaring each other with stories about the Bonehill Ghost - a menacing folkloric figure, half devil, half spectre, with flaming blue breath and metal claws. He is the Demon Drink, who will haunt Polly throughout her life; but he is also, in a sense, a harbinger of Jack the Ripper, and the personification of all the dangers, traumas, and injustices that will assail Polly over the course of her life.

The novel tracks Polly through the drudgery of her daily existence - the dead-end jobs, her relentless battle against poverty and squalor, the routine almost casual marital violence, the pleasureless sex and the unwanted pregnancies, the workhouse and the hospital ward, her fall into street prostitution. It's soul-destroying stuff, full of pain and blood, cold and hunger. 

Alan Clark's handling of the period detail is assured, from the smell of pickled whelks and horse manure in the streets to execution broadsides and divorce law reform: he has the confidence, though, not to crowd the story with superfluous historical facts or East End clichés, and he is careful to represent Polly honestly, without sentimentality and without pity, depicting her strengths and failings equally.

The book is masterful, too, in the way it choreographs the business of drinking and the miseries and self-delusions of the alcoholic personality.

How should we read A Brutal Chill? It's not strictly a biographical novel; rather, it is a work of literary imagination inspired by Polly's life in which fact and invention are combined. It's an approach that works well, letting the author create a 'voice' for Polly that is both original and appropriate and faithful to the spirit of the times, while at the same time giving him the freedom to explore his subject's thoughts and feelings, wishes and dreams, in a very intimate way.

Everything about this novel inspires admiration. It reveals terrible things about the world of London's poor, yet it is a work of great beauty, ceaselessly entertaining and compellingly readable. The rigging of a ship burning in the fire at the London Docks 'sparkles like a spider web dripping with dew at sunrise'. When we finally meet Jack the Ripper, he emerges from the darkness like an ordinary man, smelling of sulphur and soap. A Brutal Chill in August is a triumph.