The Pleasures of Men
Kate Williams
The Pleasures of Men
Catherine Sorgeiul lives with her Uncle in a rambling house in London's East End. She has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination. But then a murderer strikes, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him The Man of Crows. And as Catherine hungrily devours the news, she finds she can channel the voices of the dead ... and comes to believe she will eventually channel The Man of Crows himself.
3.2 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
416 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0241951392 |
| Publisher |
Michael Joseph |
| |
Catherine Sorgeiul lives with her Uncle in a rambling house in London's East End. She has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination. But then a murderer strikes, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him The Man of Crows. And as Catherine hungrily devours the news, she finds she can channel the voices of the dead ... and comes to believe she will eventually channel The Man of Crows himself.
Reviews
The Independent on Sunday
Lisa Hilton
"The Pleasures of Men shares with Wolf Hall an ambitious, challenging concern with form combined with a pitch-perfect historical ear. Williams has a gift for grotesque sensuality, impregnating her city with a fine layer of clinging filth. The rot is not confined to the rookeries; les fleurs du mal bloom, deformed and twisted, beneath the tightly laced corsets of St James's Square."
15/01/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Lucy Beresford
"There is poetry to Williams’s prose, with hair “like the inside of foxgloves” and an engagement ring glittering on a hand like “a glassy wart”. Some of the plot strands peter out towards the end, but the many pleasures of The Pleasures of Men, which as a title only tells half the story, lie in its sure-footed evocation of an era and its deft critique on repression."
23/01/2012
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The Daily Mail
Hephzibah Anderson
"Part-bodice-ripper, part-slasher, the book’s elaborate plot moves along at a brisk clip with a nod to the likes of Sarah Waters and Peter Ackroyd."
19/01/2012
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The Times
Kate Williams
"This is a wonderfully ripe, imaginative and gripping piece of Victorian pastiche, with a spider’s web of a plot and a spine-tingling atmosphere of menace and suspense."
07/02/2012
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The Spectator
Andrew Taylor
"So far, so gothic: in a sentence, Jack the Ripper marries Little Nell with Wilkie Collins presiding at the nuptials. The novel is written in lush, overheated and occasionally anachronistic prose that grates on the ear."
03/04/2012
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The Guardian
Mark Ravenhill
"No Victorian novelist would make such direct reference to the public events of his or her own time, and yet many of them were able to penetrate the social darkness and often perverse sexuality of their age in a way that evades Williams, for all her careful referencing of time and place. She is, it turns out, serving us a dose of gothic-lite, decaf Dickens, lacking the real thrills of the original gothic novels that Williams's heroine enjoys. "
27/01/2012
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The Sunday Times
Daisy Goodwin
"As a first novel, it should have been more rigorously edited. There were several times when I had to reread Williams’s laudanum-fogged prose again and again to have any notion of what was actually going on. This isn’t really a whodunnit, as there are no clues and no coherent story line; and the narrator is not only unreliable but, worse, deeply irritating. "
05/01/2012
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