Saturday, January 10, 2004
Tim Cratchit tries to figure out who he is while protecting a girl in 1860s London.
By RACHEL KIPP
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"Mr. Timothy," by Louis Bayard (HarperCollins, $24.95)
"Mr. Timothy" is a mystery wrapped in a character study, as Louis Bayard imagines Tiny Tim of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" as a "not so tiny anymore" 23-year-old novice detective who is suffering from a major identity crisis.
Tim is now crutch-free, but he's having a hard time shedding other parts of his youth, including his deceased father's expectations and his financial dependence on "Uncle" Ebenezer Scrooge.
To escape his problems, Tim disappears into 1860s London, taking a room at a brothel in exchange for teaching its madam how to read. He stops contacting his brother and Scrooge, who are all that's left of his family.
But he can't seem to stop taking Scrooge's money -- it gives him an allusion of the prosperity to which he feels entitled. And his father's ghost stalks him in the streets, taking the guise of total strangers. Tim also composes, in his head, letters to the dead man that rehash their difficult relationship.
Questioning identity
Tim is trying to figure out who he is, and the journey Bayard creates for him explores the questions of identity and family with humor and style. This journey uses the plot, and even the writing style, of Dickens' story to its advantage. For example, Tim reveals that the nauseatingly cheerful moppet he embodied in "A Christmas Carol" was a "narration" created by Bob Cratchit that Tim allowed to become the truth.
"The mistake I made in those days -- pardonable, I hope, in one so young -- lay in thinking that by occupying your narrative, I might exert some authorial power over it," Tim says in one "letter" to his father. "But in fact, the more thoroughly I inhabited it, the more completely it became your story. It took me many years to scribble out my own, which, I shouldn't have been surprised to learn, was rather different from the one you and I created. (I claim coauthorship only on corporeal grounds.) This boy ... this new boy ... well, he was much angrier, for one thing. ..."
Those burdens aren't the only thing following Tim around.
After discovering the bloodied and branded bodies of two young girls, Tim is drawn to protect a third girl, Philomela. He is aided in that effort by cat-hating ex-seaman Captain Gully and a singing street urchin called Colin the Melodius.
The group is tracked around foggy, sooty London by the likes of a missionary, a lord and an ex-policeman calling himself Willie the Slasher. All the "bad guys" want something from Philomela and Tim can't figure out what that something is. To Bayard's credit, the answer is just as hard to figure out for readers.