Ghastly Business is the second novel from journalist and ballet critic Louise Levene.  While her debut offering, A Vision of Loveliness, covered the heady days of the 1960s, with Ghastly Business Levene turns her eyes towards the year 1929, and the office of an eminent London pathologist.

That pathologist is the gifted but caddish Dr Alfred Kemble, and the heroine of the piece is Dora Strang, young, willful and with a keen interest in medicine.  The story itself shepherds us through Dora’s coming of age, involving attempted seductions by the menfolk of the cast, low-level harassment by an eccentric landlady, and the calculated indifference of her father, himself a doctor (albeit concerned more with the living than the dead).

That story often plays second fiddle to Levene’s masterful evocation of 1920s society.  While the vote was extended to women (and men) of over 21 the year before the events of Ghastly Business, London society is still stiflingly patriarchal.  Dora’s father heaps disapproval on her intended career, as does society as a whole –

Dr Strang had written back to the college to say that, in his view, Theodora was not mentally equipped for a degree of any kind and that he remained to be convinced that medicine was a suitable field of study, let alone a career, for females.

The attitudes and customs of the time are deliciously examined, with the News of the World the guilty pleasure of a society outwardly repelled by sex and violence but with a clandestine appetite for it which is seemingly insatiable.  Recent events are, in this respect, an absolute boon for Levene.  In conjunction with this, Levene has sourced from the British Library a vast arsenal of pornographic novellas which she uses to inform sexual scenes, quoting verbatim with a courageous approach to humour.  Seminal fluid is euphemised incessantly, to great comic effect and in a superb send-up of the prim mood of the era.

The scars of WWI are still in evidence both psychologically and socially.  A generation of bereaved women press on with their shattered lives, and men’s careers struggle on after cruel distortions at the hands of the conflict.  More horrifying though, are the repugnant ideas which foreshadow the coming conflict.  Members of the medical community debate the merits of eugenics and selective sterilisation; the seriousness with which these now utterly discredited ideas are discussed is truly harrowing.

More shocking still is the physical detail Levene includes when dealing with autopsies.  For the curtain raising post mortem, a syphilitic corpse is sliced open with gruesome glee by Dr Kemble.  From there on, details become more graphic still whenever the subject of pathology is raised.  For some time, Richard Godwin’s Apostle Rising has looked a cert for the crown of most grisly book of the year; this reviewer was utterly unprepared for Levene’s assault on Godwin’s title, coming as it does in the stealthy form of a period comedy-drama.

Perhaps the books greatest strength though, is Levene’s ability to construct a sentence.  Each line has an almost poetic perfection, from this opening salvo, which nods to the duality of charm and horror at the heart of the book –

A trio of pigeons had gathered on the pavement outside the public house on the corner and was breakfasting companionably on a pool of chilled vomit,

to this gem from the mid-section, which uses metaphor and alliteration, both to open up a principal character and to further the conflict  –

Everyone in Frithland gilded toward the grave on smoothly oiled tracks of precedence and convenience, and the fatuous fatalism of it irritated Dora into betraying yet more information.

Levene’s writing, with all its verve and vigour, is a fine thing to behold.  Ghastly Business manages to draw endless belly laughs from the blackest of subject matter, and uses expansive research to inform well-observed social commentary; this is a superb piece of fiction.

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