The Notorius Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes.The Notorius Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes * Christopher Bram Christopher Bram (born 1952, Buffalo, New York) is a writer. Life and work Bram grew up in Kempsville, Virginia (outside Norfolk), where he was a paperboy and an Eagle Scout. He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1974 (B.A. in English). * William Morrow
Dr. August is a hefty and heady slice of riveting Victoriana Discovering Christopher Bram is like discovering one of the great old-fashioned storytellers--writers like Robertson Davies or Herman Wouk or John Fowles. A new book from them was always a big event. You knew just what you were getting, and it was just what you wanted: an engrossing engrossing, in English law, practice of acquiring a monopoly of goods in order to sell them at an inflated price. The offense was ordinarily limited to monopolies of foods. Related practices were forestalling, i.e. plot, grippingly narrated, with characters and settings that jumped off the page. And not only were these books wonderful reads, but the author's heart was always in the right place, with a special sympathy for the misfits and the emotionally wounded. Bram's new novel may be the one to propel him finally into this ratified company. He has previously been best known as the author of Father of Frankenstein, upon which the film Gods and Monsters was based. His new book is something else entirely, though. The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes is long and complex, and the premise (a young man in Victorian times discovers he has a gift for contacting the dead through his music) may not sound particularly inviting. But never mind. The author is in such control of his material and is so skilled in presenting it that we soon surrender completely, and by the last 100 pages we have dropped everything and are racing through the last chapters, dying to find out what happens next. The doctor of the title is Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, a smart little gay boy who climbs--and sleeps--his way into a moderately successful career as a concert and sideshow See Windows SideShow. pianist. His gimmick is to do spiritual readings through his music. His partner (and lover), a former slave named Isaac Kemp, travels the world with him, eventually meeting Alice Pangborn, a prim governess to an awful family from Hartford, Conn. "Fitz" watches helplessly as Isaac and Alice fall in love and marry. From then on this unlikely trio crisscross Europe, sometimes as Bohemian outcasts, sometimes as the toast of the town--performing in Paris or Monte Carlo or, when things are slow, Ghent. Then an encounter with the mysterious Lady Ashe of Constantinople and her precocious young son, Freddie, sets into motion a chain of events that leads to tragedy. Dr. August is a novel with many unlikely threads--sex, race, music, pedophilia pedophilia, psychosexual disorder in which there is a preference for sexual activity with prepubertal children. Pedophiles are almost always males. The children are more often of the opposite sex (about twice as often) and are typically 13 years or age or younger; , spiritualism spiritualism: see spiritism. spiritualism Belief that the souls of the dead can make contact with the living, usually through a medium or during abnormal mental states such as trances. , the proprieties of the Victorian age--and it is to Bram's credit that each plays a crucial role in the book's denouement de·noue·ment also dé·noue·ment n. 1. a. The final resolution or clarification of a dramatic or narrative plot. b. . The historical elements are beautifully imagined--along the way we cross paths with Brahms, Sigmund Freud, and Mrs. Tom Thumb. But the intensity of the love and hate that Bram's unlikely trio of protagonists feel for one another is what gives the book its power. This is, quite simply, storytelling at its best. Find more on Christopher Bram, his books, and related Internet sites at www.advocate.com Plunkett is the author of Love Junkie junkie Popular health A popular term for a person, usually an IV narcotic abusing addict, whose life is disorganized vis-á-vis family and societal structure, whose existence revolves around obtaining–often through theft, prostitution or other illicit . |
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