The Osiris Ritual

[sawyl]

Following on in sequence from my last book post, my official first book of 2010 was George Mann's The Osiris Ritual which is set a few months after the events of The Affinity Bridge and is set in the same alternate version of 1901 London.

The morning after attending a society party to celebrate the latest discovers of the Egyptologist, Lord Winthrop, Sir Maurice Newbury finds himself ordered to Waterloo to deal with the repatriation of the enigmatic Caspian, one of Her Majesty's agents in St. Petersburg. When the man fails to appear on his appointed train, Newbury starts digging into the man's past, only to discover that Caspian's past is somehow tied up in the disgrace of Newbury's immediate predecessor, the brilliant and unprincipled Aubery Knox.

When Winthrop is discovered murdered mere hours after his triumphant party, Newbury initially suspects that the aristocrat has fallen victim to a professional rival. But when the rival turns out to have an ironclad alibi, Sir Maurice starts to suspect that the case of the mummy's curse might be linked with the case of Her Majesty's missing agent.

Veronica Hobbes, meanwhile, has been investigating the disappearances of a string of young working-class women and has finally managed to correlate some of them with appearances by a stage magician called The Mysterious Alphonso. After an inconclusive initial encounter with the magician, Veronica finds herself becoming increasingly obsessed with her case, to the point where begins to neglect her primary duty: keeping a watchful eye on Newbury. And Newbury is definitely in need of watching for, although not drifting into occult danger, as Knox did, he is gradually drifting further into drug addiction, having taken up visiting opium dens in order to help him deal with his investigative workload.

The Osiris Ritual seems largely to avoid the problems that bothered me in The Affinity Bridge. The plotting seemed to me to be much tighter, with the stands coming together much later in the novel, and the characters seemed much stronger and more developed than in the first book — I particularly liked the way that both the main characters struggled to balance their obsessive desires with their duties.

Thus Newbury is fully aware of his gradual slide into addiction, but he justifies this by claiming that opium is not just a weakness but something that allows him to focus his abilities and become the best detective he can truly be, even as the drug starts to undercut his ability to function effectively. All of which gives him depth of character, describing insecurities largely missing from the first novel, which make his growing worries about Aubery Knox more convincing; for if Knox, described by all as a great genius, could fall, how easy would it be for Sir Maurice to do the same?

Hobbes, too, finds herself struggling with her desire to help the dispossessed — something fueled by her inability to help her sister, who is clearly dying despite the best efforts of the doctors at the asylum — and her duty to protect Sir Maurice from himself. Obviously troubled by her orders which, if they were known to her partner, would undercut his self-esteem yet further and make him more likely to fall into the ways of his predecessor, Hobbes follows a course of action that places her at great risk and makes things far worse than they might otherwise have been.

Even the less significant characters came across more strongly than in the previous novel. Sir Charles Bainbridge got to reveal the humanity buried beneath his bluff policeman's exterior, while the young and the enthusiastic journalist George Purefoy seems like exactly the sort of person that Newbury might very well want to take on as an apprentice.

I'm definitely looking forward to reading the next book in sequence which, I assume given some dark hints towards the end of the book, may have something to do with Amelia Hobbes' transfer from the asylum at Wandsworth to the Grayling Institute, the demesne of the Queen's Physician, Dr. Fabian.