Picture a cold, damp hut, surrounded by mischievous crows, on the banks of a swollen river, against the backdrop of a smoky, nineteenth-century city awash in crime lifted straight out of a penny dreadful. Add this to the miserable squalor: that the resident of said hut, one Robin Sparrows, serves as office clerk to a predatory law firm whose motto, Lupi pastores erunt, means ‘the wolves shall shepherd them.’ Not exactly the image of a virtuous law practice, although its clerks do command a respect of their own.  It is this dank, putrid, and, yes, miserable world that Mister Sparrows must navigate in order to solve a case that will carry him everywhere from the slimiest sewers to the poshest neighborhoods.

Claudon is the capital city of Albion and a metropolis of a far-stretching empire–quite like London in its Victorian heyday. News of distant wars from the colonies stirs its population into patriotic fervor, the singing of anthems and ballads, and hero worship. One such hero, Captain Dearing, will present a gift to the ambassador of Crocodon, a set of graven images, to help ease tensions following the Crocodile War. Against this backdrop, Sparrows must deliver a mysterious package to the infamous blackguard Kermit J. Tarnish.

The Scoundrel of the Empire, the Shame of His Majesty’s Redcoats, Tarnish committed the unpardonable crime of kidnapping the Crocodon princess. Sparrows’s mission is a top secret delivery to Tarnish’s dark prison cell, but to apply Murphy’s law, not everything goes according to plan.

Dickensian in its squalor and cartoonish humour, each chapter titled with the “In which” of a nineteenth-century novel, The Miseries of Mister Sparrows cannot help but make the reader laugh at its quirky characters and the–need I say miserable?–circumstances into which Mr. Sparrows constantly stumbles headlong. There is some intentional slapstick to the humour at the same time as you feel Mr. Sparrows’s cold plight seep into your bones. Matthew Timmins boldly sets out to pastiche the humour of P.G. Wodehouse, a task at which few have succeeded. Since I myself have never read Wodehouse, I will leave it to the discerning leader to judge his success. However, the playful nineteenth-century style he opens his novel with remains consistent until the end, a real accomplishment that lends a great texture to the novel.

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Did you like this book? You might be interested in these:

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville: https://matthewrettino.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/perdido-street-station-by-china-mieville/

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman: https://matthewrettino.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/neverwhere-by-neil-gaiman/

*Disclosure: I acted as proofreader for this novel.