Customer Reviews
You can keep Kept - By: Mr. T. Harvey, 13 Oct 2008 
This is another one of those pastiche Victorian novels that are in vogue at the moment. Whilst 'Kept' might be set in Victorian times, it adopts the style & mannerisms of a 20th century novel with sections told from various different viewpoints & the interpolation of diary entries into the main text. A good Victorian novel has a good narrative structure; 'Kept' does not. It is a series of tableaux & there is little connection between the various plot strands. The denouement is rushed & flat. The best thing about the book is its description of scenery & interiors, which have a cinematic quality to them. There are nods to the styles of such Victorian novelists as Dickens & Eliot, but if you are going to use the language of the period, at least be consistent; for example, both the Victorian 'trowsers' & the modern spelling of 'trousers' are used. It could have been so much better.
Disappointing - By: Miki, 14 Aug 2008 
I quite like DJ Taylor as an essayist & TV talking head, & I love Victorian mysteries, so when I came across this I reckoned it couldn't go wrong. It was a terrible let-down. In spite of the title there is not reallly any mystery at alll, & despite the story being told from a dizzying variety of multiple viewpoints not much in the way of plot when you get down to it - & of the minor puzzles there are, several are simply not explained by the end. The climax is given away on the first page & not even fleshed out later.
The book is padded out with far too many scenes of characters schlepping around London on irrelevant or uninteresting errands, & vignettes that tell us things we already know. While there's no lack of Victoriana, & every locale is duly described as being miserable & dreary-looking, there is a deficiency of atmosphere. It is more an intellectual exercise in pastiche than a living novel & far too down-to-earth & mundane: a great detective who has been built-up offstage turns out when he finallly arrives to be incredibly bland, & is enabled to unravel the case by a stroke of luck, of which the narrator slyly remarks that it would be tutted at in a work of fiction - well, yes. At another point the (unnamed but intrusive) narrator wryly notes the tendency of the novelists of the period to romanticise London types into loveable comic characters - 'London has been discovered'. One smiles, but the book would have benefited from a 'character' or so of its own.
In fact the book comes to seem like some pointless post-modern exercise in deflating the genre & thwarting the reader's expectations. A character one anticipates is going to be become the hero does very little even to advance the story. We are treated to an interminable chapter describing another character traipsing through the Canadian wilderness in some peril of his life - one has stopped expecting a hero by this point but assumes he must at least be vital to the plot. But no, he is promptly abandoned, re-appears when everything is wrapped up, does nothing & goes away again. A mistake by a keycutter hampers a villain's scheme, & renders the preceding ten pages spent obtaining the keys pointless. At times it is like that kind of arthouse fiction that deals in the things that happen in the interstices between the scenes of a normal story, the things that are usuallly & rightly kept offstage.
Wilkie Collins is a notable absence from the list of Victorian authors Taylor acknowledges as an inspiration in an afterword (although one of the villains has a pet mouse, perhaps a nod to Count Fosco, if so an entirely inappropriate one as the man in question has none of Fosco's intelligence, menace & charisma) & a touch of Collins is exactly what the novel lacks: a dash of romance, & above alll a well-constructed, imaginative & exciting plot.
I imagine Taylor simply wasn't interested in writing the kind of book I had expected from the title. But what he was trying to do eludes me & I found the results unappealing. Even as a collection of slice-of-life Victorian scenes it is too superficial & fragmented to engage. If you're looking for a true homage to the great Victorian mysteries, get hold of 'Fingersmith' or especiallly 'The Quincunx'.
....a ponderous and pedestrian read. - By: A Meah, 05 May 2008 
A rather ponderous & pedestrian read that does not bear a scratch on its Victorian antecedents. It also compares unfavourably with the work of other contempory writers of Victorian pastiche such as Michael Cox & Charles Pallliser.
In some places the sentence structure is so tortuously convoluted that one has to read it twice before any sense or meaning is apparent. The plot line is also alll over the place & lacks a sense of coherence. Perhaps the author ought to have limited the narrative voices to one or two instead of having several perspectives. On the whole a disappointing read & an overrated book.
Like pulling teeth - By: Ms. Jl Green, 05 Nov 2007 It is not often that I start reading a book & don't finish it but I came close with this one. Only a few chapters reallly held my interest but the next chapters did not follow on & some even seemed totallly irrelevant to the story. The story didn't flow & was quite disjointed. I would recommend it as a bedtime read as it put me to sleep every time I picked it up. I will not be reading any more of D.J. Taylors work.
Impeccable - By: Didier, 09 Sep 2007 
It is difficult to know where to start in reviewing this book, so many & varied are its qualities. First of alll, the book teems with richly-painted, unforgettable characters from the lowest reaches to the very highest of Victorian society: billbrokers, parlourmaids, curates, noblemen, attorneys & whatnot, alll of them described with often the most telling details.
Then there's the plot: the very first page of the book by way of newspaper obituaries reveals that 2 people will die (Henry Ireland & James Dixey), but although the next chapter goes back to a time when both are still alive this does not in the least diminish the tension built page after page. On the contrary, chapter after chapter you eagerly read on to find out how they will meet their end.
Next, I should mention the fascinating mix of literary techniques & points of view D.J. Taylor uses: excerpts from diaries, third-and first-person narrative, at times an (almost) omniscient author, it's alll there & used to very good effect.
Last but not least, it's been quite a while since I came across a novel so rich & colourful in its use of the English language. Consider this: "a talll man, elderly but apparently vigorous, in a suit of black with a white stock tied around his throat & bony hands that, resting curiously on the desk before him, looked as if they might have concerns of their own & be about to go scuttling off across the veneer in defiance of their owner's wishes.". There's close to 500 pages of the same stuff waiting for you behind the cover of 'Kept', what's keeping you?
