Unfit to Print, by K.J. Charles (audio book)

[Ulysses]

Unfit to Print
By KJ Charles
Audio book, 2018
Narrated by Vikas Adam
Five stars

KJ Charles takes us into a Dickensian London the likes of which Dickens never acknowledged (if he knew about it). Gilbert Lawless is the illegitimate child of an English gentleman, tossed on the street at his father’s death. The twist here is that his mother was a maidservant, and a woman of color.

We meet Lawless as he deals with his father’s family after the death of his nasty, miserly half-brother. It turns out Gil’s profession – a writer of and dealer in books that include pornography – is of essential use to keep the Law family name untainted.

Vikram Pandey, an Oxford-educated solicitor of Indian heritage, meets Gil Lawless in the course of trying to locate a missing Indian boy from the community he serves – the outcast and downtrodden Indians in Victorian London. Here the twist is that he recognizes Gil as his closest friend from school – who disappeared from his life one day when they were both sixteen.

It is refreshing to see an author deal with issues of race and racism (and, as always in English books, class) in this period, and to do it in a way that is both romantic and believable. She relies on plenty of archetypes that we know and love from Dickens and Trollope, but brings this kind of story to a place unimaginable in the actual time and place of the story’s setting.

Gil and Vik are so very different, but they both know what it is to suffer racism, and both have coped in their lives to feel independent and proud of who they are. They each initially want to look down on the other in judgement (and feelings of betrayal are part of that, each man remembering the sadness of the moment they were taken from each other). However, as they work together to solve a mystery that appalls both of them in a similar way, the closeness they felt as teenagers begins to reassert itself.

Vikas Adam does a great job with the narrative, giving us the distinctive flavors of his main characters, as well as all the supporting cast that populate this vivid fictional world. Victorian prejudice resonates with that of our own times, giving a sharp taste of reality to temper the fantasy of romance.