A few years ago, the author and literary critic Angelo Rinaldi wrote in one of his columns: “A novel is grief supported by grammar.” We can say that when writing his fiction The Whitechapel DwarfAix resident Cyril Anton has made this definition his own, which he likes to quote readily.
There is a lot of talk about grief in the story of his hero who, “despite his small legs, spent his life chasing time.” A dwarf then, who before being hired by Scotland Yard to solve a series of crimes perpetrated by a gang called Tabula Rasa, was called by people “Half Pint”, “Little Lord”, “O” or “Demi -Portion”. A child unloved by his father, a brutal being who prefers his twin Vincent Swinburne, although much less gifted than him for horse riding, fencing, studies and especially music and the piano.
Violence and poverty in London
Unacceptable for the head of the family that Oscar, who has kept the body of a child but suffered from the ugliness of adults, is more efficient than the normal son… A heartless man, the father abandons his “dwarf of a son” in a kennel where he will be picked up by Freddy, an old black man, miserable, caring and a wonderful pianist. “Freddy had also found in him a son, and Oscar, a new family“, we are told. A family made up of dogs and a large shadow who walked to the music.
We are in London at the end of the 19th century, at a time when the industrial revolution was unleashing its violence and poverty was rampant. “It was in this era that all current economic and sociological ills took root.“, details Cyril Anton who adds, “my novel is a book about yesterday that speaks to us about today.”
A hymn to the wounded and excluded
Author of songs, crazy about cinema, Cyril Anton started from the presentation of his hero and narrator of the novel to bring together around him a crowd of heterogeneous characters, broken by life, including Rose the one-legged person who, apart from her handicap, recalls the two legendary Italian actresses, Silvana Mangano and Claudia Cardinale.
A hymn to the wounded, the excluded, the humiliated, all built on very visual scenes inspired by Freaks, the American film directed in 1932 by Tod Browning, and of course Elephant Manthe feature film by David Lynch.
No demonstration here, everything is suggested, the grammar supporting Oscar’s grief (his determination too) highlights the importance of the bodies, the settings in a superb language which mixes genres. At the same time a fairy tale inspired by the Grand Guignol, an anticipatory thriller, a western, a historical dive against the backdrop of Chopin’s “Nocturne” and Schubert’s impromptus, a drama which also does not lack humor, the epic of Oscar Swinburne, who became Oscar Dièse, shows how painful it is for him to feel both “Redskin, Jew, Bohemian, Indian, Black, Irish, Arab, dwarf, giant, madman, homosexual, pagan, and agnostic.“
This story offers a reflection on the capacity of resistance of men, their cruelty, their dreams, shaken and dazzled. We emerge from this first novel captivated by the story and impressed by the style as much as by the narrative structure of the story which breaks the chronology.
“The Dwarf of Whitechapel” by Cyril Anton. Editions du Sonneur. 191 pages, €17.50.
