Mark Blacklock’s audacious 2015 debut, I’m Jack, drew on the troubled life of John Humble, the Wearside ex-convict who tricked police into believing that he was the Yorkshire Ripper, fatally diverting their investigation 100 miles away from the true crime scene. Splicing fictitious testimony from Humble with an array of real-life documents and creepy interludes inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and Psycho author Robert Bloch, the novel was a strange, slippery mashup of grinding social realism and grinning postmodernism, in which the author rendered himself all but invisible in the proceedings.
His equally tricksy new book centres on the Victorian theoretical physicist, Charles Howard Hinton (known here as Howard), an Oxford contemporary of Oscar Wilde who devoted his research on space and time to the fourth dimension, believing that “there is accessible to us all a higher form of thought and… we may truly be extended in dimensions beyond the three we physically occupy”.
Although we might share the fear of Howard’s publisher that he is “too much of an ordinary-minded individual to fully enter into your thoughts”, the novel draws us into this scientific quest by portraying Howard’s hunger for transcendence as a symptom of, and reaction to, personal strife. Disgraced by a conviction for bigamy, he left the UK (and two children by his first wife) to settle in Japan with his second family before moving to the US for a series of academic posts, which is where Blacklock picks up the story.
The third-person narration unfolds in the cool, clean present tense we’ve come to associate with modern historical fiction. The perspective floats around smoothly to trace the fortunes of each of his four children by his second wife, Mary, whose thoughts on her sidelined counterpart stay under wraps until a late series of diary entries, which are among an array of nested documents introduced by a Blacklock-like researcher in the novel’s second half. Letters exchanged by Howard’s circle of fin de siècle luminaries, including the sexologist Havelock Ellis and writer Olive Schreiner, give the title new significance when we see that Howard’s disgrace is connected in the public imagination with that of his father, James Hinton, a surgeon and philosopher whose advocacy of polygamy shaded into a series of unwelcome “approaches”, to use the novel’s contemporaneously circumspect term.
Ultimately, Hinton serves as an ingenious variant on the traditional buried secret narrative, in which the requisite playing for time is primarily an effect of structure, not to mention any number of diverting typographical tricks - when Hinton tries looking through a stereoscope for the first time, there’s a ghostly doubling of the text; when he invents a machine for throwing baseballs, the sound appears in supersize fonts. Yet, perhaps aptly for a novel concerned with the psychic repercussions of denial, it’s hard not to feel that the relentless game-playing might also work to ward off hard questions about the value Blacklock is adding by telling Hinton’s story this way, rather than as orthodox biography.
• Hinton by Mark Blacklock is published by Granta (£16.99)
