A Gentleman Tutor, by Harper Fox

[Ulysses]

A Gentleman Tutor
By Harper Fox
Published by FoxTales, 2020
Five stars

Sigh. I have to confess, Harper Fox is my favorite author of all, and I’d probably love the telephone directory if she put her name to it (do they even have telephone directories in paper anymore?). However, this sigh is for real and for the latest of her books, which I snapped up and piled into my extensive Kindle backlog. I always resist starting Harper Fox’s books, because I know that, once I start, they’ll eventually end, and that always makes me sad.

“A Gentleman Tutor” is a miracle of literary sleight-of-hand. It is a fantasy, a fairy tale (no snorts of laughter, I am not being sly). It is a book that could only be written here and now in this wretched world where we all are – and yet it manages to lure us into believing it to be a story from the turn of the twentieth century, as poor old Victoria gasps out her last, and the British Empire is at its bloody zenith.

Francis Harte is a school teacher, and a survivor of one of the empire’s bloody skirmishes in the Far East. He and his childhood friend Cyril both came back to London and settled into lives of obscure penury – until Cyril’s father died and left him a fortune. Francis, aka Frank, struggles along, with his war wounds, with his teaching, with the awful winter cold of London, until Cyril gives him a lead to a possible job tutoring the feckless son of a filthy-rich earl in Knightsbridge. Francis follows up on this lead, and lands himself a post in the earl’s vast, well-heated, luxurious house. His only task is to babysit and, hopefully, teach something to the twenty-year-old Viscount Gracewater, known as Gracie, or Scapegrace.

“The room was enormous, high-ceilinged, every cornice carved or plaster-worked into decorative submission.” Ah, words to warm a retired curator’s heart. This is the kind of elegant, vivid prose that always makes Fox’s books stand out amongst the scores of novels I read each year. She manages to create an intense sense of place in Gracewater House, without stumbling into tedious over-description (such things were largely taken for granted in novels about the nobility). The house, its warmth, its comforts, become an increasingly heavy presence as the story progresses.

It all seems too good to be true, and indeed (as these things always are in novels) it is. The exotic opulence of the earl’s mansion quickly becomes the stage-set of a gothic novel, replete with madness, perversion, and physical violence. With every day, Harte becomes more and more alarmed, even as he grows ever fonder of Gracie, surprised at feelings he thought had died at the point of a knife thousands of miles away.

Although this is the first “period” book of Harper Fox’s I’ve read, it shares all those qualities of her other books that have come to mark them for me as special. There is action and emotion, carefully developed and folded gently together. There is even the necessary physical intimacy that the genre demands – but handled so deftly and intelligently that it becomes spiritual as much as sexual, and also essential to the development of the characters and their tale.

One of the best surprises for me, a longtime fan of nineteenth-century English novels, is an internal detail that sheds great light on both Frank and Gracie – the young viscount’s reading of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a book I’ve read twice and struggled with both times. The other modern novels mentioned in this story, Dickens’ “Bleak House,” and Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now,” both allude directly to the ugly mess at the center of “A Gentleman Tutor,” but only if you’ve read them. Both books are favorites of mine, and I was floored that Fox went so far as this to build a strong foundation for her own fictional account of modern life in Victorian London.

Fox’s language is perfectly calibrated. She doesn’t trip into anachronism, but also avoids the turgid prose one finds in so much Victorian literature. She walks a fine line between authenticity and readability, and never once stumbles. For a reader like me, this is a rare gift, and one to be treasured.

Toward the end of the book, one of the characters comments, “Such a little island as Britain, I mean – so powerful and ferocious, and so completely alone. Do you think we’ll ever be forgiven?” This brought a tear to my eye, because of course it not only reminds us of the current, post-Brexit Britain, but also of our own, embattled, humiliated nation. I suppose I love stories that expose the ugliness of the past, because they remind me that, while politics and imperialism come and go, love, hope and faith remain – and of these, the greatest is love.