The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper

the book is much more than a slash-and-gore filled crime genre mystery. West gives the Women of Whitechapel voice here and plumbs to the depths of a world of sordid artists and royals. There's a harrowing psychological tale to be told here, no matter who committed the murders. And besides, it's much more interesting to imagine the royals doing it than your average guy on the street.

Paul West's novel is an often intriguing, luridly fascinating meditation on the sensational Ripper murders, the very nature of evil itself, the obligations and prerogatives of art, and, ultimately the responsibilities of the artist toward society, and his fellow human beings. West's novel, by his own admission in the foreword, is an exercise in creative license writ large. Using the highly speculative, but nonetheless fascinating "Royal Conspiracy" scenario for the gruesome murder spree that took the lives of five prostitutes in the seamy Whitechapel section of London in 1888, the aesthetic core of the book concerns the Impressionist painter, Walter Sickert's almost Hamlet-like agonized ruminations over his role in bringing the scourge of the murderer upon his forlorn and debased victims. Most of the novel is comprised of Sickert's incessant brooding upon his perveted erotic attraction to the vulgar, dissipated women and their squalid environment, as well as its relationship to his art; his self-loathing and condemnation as a coward who not only fails to act to save the women from their ghastly fate, but, disturbingly, experiences a trace of sordid pleasure as they are butchered in front of his very eyes. West has a formidable vocabulary with which to realize his novel's profound artistic ambitions, but unfortunately that very asset ironically leads to the undesired effect of weakening the work's message and impact. West seems intent on flaunting his facillity with polysyllabics, with the result that "The Women of Whitechapel" is often over-written, with many abstruse, impenetrable passages, several re-readings of which fail to bring any light of clarification or comprehension, much to the reader's frustration That is a shame, too, because there is much that is admirable and thought-provoking in this otherwise seminal work that delves deeply into all the issues resonating from the Ripper crimes, including the institutionalized evils of misogyny, as well as the social and economic iniquities of the Victorian England which is its setting.