“The children are taken far away, after the fire, and they are given new names.” In the opening pages of The Naming of the Birds, we encounter a young girl. England, in the spring of 1872, and this child had her own name once – but it has been removed from her, and she is now named Nightingale. The other children – living in a sadistic asylum run by black-coated men – have been similarly renamed for birds, but Nightingale is the determined one, the one to watch, the one preternaturally aware of her surroundings.
The one in whom her enemies will, perhaps, meet their match.
Through Nightingale, we have glimpses of a backstory: the fire in a gloomy Gothic orphanage, the multiple deaths, and then a short journey here to this place of horror, where children are punished by being locked in an oubliette – a grave with a lid, where there is no room to move.
So begins Paraic O’Donnell’s brilliantly compelling new novel, the sequel prefigured in the closing pages of its predecessor, The House on Vesper Sands. Having met Nightingale and her unfortunate companions, we are brought forward 22 years, and we encounter once again the hapless, Cambridge-educated Gideon Bliss, his aptly named boss Inspector Cutter, and the brisk and clever Octavia Hillingdon, who is patient with Gideon and gets things done.
[ The House on Vesper Sands: a delicately and skilfully crafted Victorian thrillerOpens in new window ]
Matters are pressing: there has been a rash of particularly gruesome murders in sooty Victorian London, and Octavia’s intelligence is needed more than ever.
O’Donnell works in this novel with a series of tropes, infusing them with new life. This is a police procedural, but one in which the period detail is perfectly evoked, the dialogue crackling with wit, and the relationships energised by tinctures of affection and irritation.
And our stories have always been filled with lost children, whose lives and deaths are ordained by adults of peculiar wickedness: in this case, the hateful Sylvia Lytton, reminiscent of the child-stealing Mrs Coulter of Northern Lights. And then there is Nightingale herself, once a child and now an adult, whose life has become a quest for vengeance – and whose story lifts this book into a considerable meditation on power and its abuses, and on the possibilities of justice.
[ There are no rules: debut author Paraic O’Donnell’s advice to aspiring authorsOpens in new window ]
