E-Mail This Article to a Friend Twisted Wesley Stace’s tall Victorian tale BY CLEA SIMON
	Misfortune By Wesley Stace. Little, Brown, 544 pages, $23.95.

Fans of the singer John Wesley Harding have long known him to be a witty master of wordplay and timing, in many ways a throwback to an earlier era — part Bob Dylan, part old English balladeer. Small wonder then that his debut novel, published under his given name, Wesley Stace, is a delicious tour de force studded with punning twists, turn-arounds, and questions of identity. What fans may not expect is that Misfortune, which seems to have been inspired equally by Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, is a historical romp, a 19th-century-style bodice ripper of the most entertaining sort.

Like many of Dickens’s young characters — and much in the style of Henry Fielding before him — Stace’s protagonist is an orphan, though more a lucky Tom Jones–style foundling than a bereft Oliver Twist. Picked off a trash heap (his benefactor gives a stray mutt a lamb chop in exchange for the babe, which the dog has in its mouth), the infant is taken into the exalted Loveall family and raised as its heir. And, as is in some ways reminiscent of Woolf’s novel, the young male is brought up as a female named Rose Old (an anagram of his savior’s late lamented sister’s name) and must resolve issues of gender as well as sexuality as he grows and his family fortunes evolve. Rose’s coming of age and his resolution of these issues, along with the usual family rivalries, romances, and grand continental adventures, make for a rollicking plot line through the Europe of the day, much like the ballads that Rose and (one suspects) author Stace are so fond of. Indeed, the promotional material distributed with Misfortune identifies the novel’s origin as one of Stace’s songs, "Miss Fortune," and announces that a CD of Stace performing the ballads in the book is due in July.

But if this novel is firmly rooted in the 1800s, its style is not. Stace takes a playful postmodern attitude toward the conventions of that day and this, beginning his story with an omniscient narrator who watches as the dim-witted young balladeer Pharaoh carries the infant (which he’s been told is a bundle of poison) out to be discarded. Stace paints a London underbelly that’s as poverty-stricken as any in Dickens but with an unflinching contemporary explicitness, a seaminess that the real Victorian would never have approached. "It was the end of his journey, the end of the line, where the city oozed what it had no more use for and couldn’t burn. All the avenues of excrement and urine made their way here and Pharaoh knew the stench was what came after the smell of life, after the sweat and the bodies, the rooms and their contents."

Even amid all that blood and sweat, there’s humor, however, as when the bachelor Lord Loveall presents his find to his mother: "Loveall looked down at the baby, still a very red baby, far from the pink of health, and back at his mother. She had not been expecting to see the next Lady Loveall, much less see her delivered for view in a baby carriage." Such gentle mocking evokes Fielding more than the sentimental Dickens, but soon both are blown away as Rose takes over his own story, dismissing the omnipotent narrator ("let’s call him God") to dictate his adventures to an unnamed amanuensis. The style continues in that slightly florid, dryly humorous conversational tone (one thinks of Trollope’s sly barbs) enriched by the first-person ability to describe emotions and (perhaps most important as Rose explores his sexuality) sensation. Despite several digressions and the occasional lapse into anachronistic language ("Between him and Pharaoh, afternoon tea had begun to resemble a food fight"), the center holds, and as the tale unfolds, guessing at the identity of that unseen scribe becomes one more puzzle to piece together.

As sexy and as much fun as Misfortune is, this enjoyably thick novel is not one of a kind. Rather, Stace’s 544-page epic seems to be part of the growing trend of hefty-19th-century revivalists. Already compared in pre-publication press with Michel Faber’s 800-page-plus The Crimson Petal and the White, which also alternates between high and low life in Victorian London, Stace’s novel more closely resembles Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith. Although the connection with Faber’s harsh picaresque accords Misfortune more literary panache, and some of those early scenes of dirt and moral decay evoke Faber’s masterpiece, Waters’s 500-page-plus Dickensian whodunit is a better match. That’s true particularly in the ways both authors nod to past masters to resolve sexuality and identity issues (plot turns that only a spoiler would reveal), and in the humor that keeps both weighty tomes buoyant, despite the twists and turns of the whimsical Trollopian gods.

Wesley Stace reads next Thursday, May 5, at 7:30 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street in Newton; call (617) 244-6619.