Homunculus

By James P. Blaylock

Everybody wants the homunculus. This little man-like creature from outer space has strange powers including the power to animate the dead and the power to drive men insane. Trapped fifteen years ago in a small box on a flying blimp powered by a perpetual motion machine, now the the blimp's course is declining and may soon come down on Hampstead Heath in London. Good guys and bad guys are all aiming to get their hands on this damned illusive homunculus, no matter the consequences.
Set in Victorian era Britain, this strange novel features an evil hunchbacked zombie-creating doctor who can even reanimate a skeleton using a gland he harvests from a live carp, a debauched millionaire with a string of brothels, a pimply-faced punk with delusions of grandeur and an obsession with an innocent young woman, a crazed evangelist who thinks he is the second coming of Christ and who wants the doctor who reanimate his mother who has been dead for many years, and numerous zombies who subsist on blood pudding.
The good guys are not as striking or as interesting but include a scientist who is building his own space ship and really, really wants to find the homunculus' space ship which has been hidden away in one of the millionaire's brothels. There is also a toymaker who builds fancy toy boxes and ingenious devices which feature prominently in the story as the homunculus is imprisoned in one of these puzzle boxes but which box no one but the toymaker knows for sure.
So the good guys and the bad guys are plotting against one another and they all want the homunculus which may soon be landing in London. Lots of head bashing, slogging through London's sewers, grappling with one another, gun play, kidnappings, consumption of mass quantities of alcohol, bombs going off, buildings demolished, interspersed with comedic moments and wrapped in a Victorian atmosphere that would make you swear the novel was written in the 1880s and not the 1980s make for a story that is unforgettable. Not to mention the Marseilles pinkle!

I enjoyed this book quite a lot, especially the more ridiculous parts. Still it was rather disappointing that the homunculus, the focus of so much desire and greed, makes only the briefest of appearances, despite serving as the title character of the book. What it was doing on Earth, how it had such impressive powers, how it could survive for years trapped in a little box with no food or water are never addressed. Perhaps the book only rates a "fair read" but it is a really memorable tale, kind of like reading Dickens for the first time, so I guess I should really rate a "good read."

New Words

Serried: Crowded together in rows; shoulder to shoulder. "Leaves and dust and bits of paper whirled through the darkness, across Battersea Park and the pleasure boats serried along the Chelsea shore, round the tower of St. Lukes's and into darkness."

Costermongers: A costermonger is a street seller of fruit and vegetables. The term, which derived from the words costard (a type of large ribbed apple) and monger, i.e. "seller", came to be particularly associated with the 'barrow boys' of London who would sell their produce from a wheelbarrow or wheeled cart. "The city was stirring. The carts of ambitious costermongers and greengrocers already clattered along to market, and silent oyster boats sailed out of Chelsea Reach toward Billingsgate."

Bummarees: A bummaree is a dealer at Billingsgate fish market or a porter at Smithfield meat market. "It was with the dawn that the blimp was sighted over Billingsgate. The weathered gondola creaked in the wind like the hull of a ship tossing on slow swells, and its weird occupant, secured to the wooden shell of his strange swaying aerie like a barnacle to a wave-washed rock, stared sightlessly down on fishmongers' carts and bummarees and creeping handbarrows filled with baskets of shellfish and eels, the wind whirling the smell of it all east down Lower Thames Street, bathing the Custom House and the Tower in the odor of seaweed and salt spray and tidal flats."

Spindrift: Spray blown up from the surface of the sea. "The street was silent and wet, and the smell of rain on pavement hung in the air of the tobacco shop, reminding the Captain briefly of spindrift and fog."

Latakia: An aromatic Turkish tobacco. "Nothing, it seemed to him, was worth losing your sense of proportion and humor over, least of all a steak pie, a pint of ale, and a pipe of latakia."

Trismegistus: Greek, it means "thrice-blessed" or "thrice-greatest". For more info visit this site at Roanoke. "There was no one beyond the seven of them whom they could trust, and no one, certainly, who had any business at a meeting of the Trismegistus Club."

Benthamite: A follower of Jeremy Bentham, an English utilitarian philosopher and social reformer of the 1700s. "It was his moneyed air that was so annoying -- an air that betrayed a sort of Benthamite smugness and superiority, that exclaimed its own satisfaction with itself and its faint dissatisfaction with, in this case, William Keeble, who had been surprised in his nightshirt and cloth cap and so was automatically one down."

Cheval glass: A vertical mirror hung between two vertical posts, also called a free standing mirror; a full length mirror supported by a frame and four feet. "Wind whistled beyond the casement while St. Ives squinted into the little cheval glass atop his nightstand."

General paresis: A form of neurosyphilis (syphilis affecting the central nervous system -- the brain and spinal cord). "There's a reference to a successful experiment in which he spawned mice from a heap of old rags, and another in which he revivified an old man from Chingford, who was dying of general paresis."

Anacharis and ambulia: water plants. "Trailing anacharis and ambulia, Pule wrenched at his fish, slamming it against the stone monolith as he rolled against it."

Choke damp: Asphyxiating gas, largely carbon dioxide, accumulated in a mine, well, etc. "Deener, wary of choke damp, breathed through a kerchief tied over his nose and mouth."