Karen Baston, Birkbeck Early Modern Society
Review of Kill-Grief
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Birkbeck Early Modern Society Bulletin Issue 14 Spring 2010
Caroline Rance’s novel is a tale of addiction set in Chester in 1756. It is also a mystery which allows its story to unfold via flashbacks and cleverly placed clues and references. The first few pages are deceptively simple. You think you are reading something to set the stage while you are enjoying some excellent descriptive passages. But later on you realise that returning to those first few pages and re-reading them would be a very good idea indeed.
Mary Helsall arrives in Chester with the cold winter weather of January 1756. She quickly takes a position as a nurse at the town’s newly opened hospital for the poor. The hospital is next to the gaol and we soon find out that this is important for our heroine. Although she seems young and innocent at first, we gradually find out that Mary has a past and is much worldlier than she seems. This is no Hogarthian Harlot’s Progress but rather more like a trip to Gin Lane.
Mary owes her new position to a local magistrate. She has never been a nurse before and has no training nor is any expected. Her first duties involve getting the hospital ready to receive its first patients. When the patients start to come one of them seems to know a lot about Mary. Things she would rather not have her new colleagues, especially the handsome but alcoholic porter she is falling for fast, know. Mary’s life is certainly complicated and it is about to be more so.
Mary used to drink brandy – and I won’t say how or where she came by it since I don’t want to give away too much of the plot – but now she can only afford gin or ‘kill-grief’ as it is known. ‘Kill-grief’ has her lover Anthony in its grasp and Mary soon joins him in wandering through the streets of Chester in search of their fix. It is a grim world of gin houses and poverty. It is a place Anthony and Mary would very much like to leave so they can break their habit and start a new life in London. But Mary has some things to do in Chester before she can go anywhere. These things involve someone who is in the gaol and who is known as ‘The Hatchet’. She needs to wait until the circuit court arrives – the judges like to time their visits with the horse racing season – before she can move on. Meanwhile, we begin to see that Mary may be in far more trouble than she knows and that someone she trusts might be lying to her to preserve his own reputation.
Rance has a deft touch at building tension and a true gift for description. Mary’s world is one of blood and guts and vomit and sweat. It’s not a world of comfort. There is violence and there are hangovers. From the hospital to the gaol to the meanest drinking dens to the cold air of the city walls, Mary travels around Chester in a search for herself and her future while she waits for closure about her past. While working at the hospital she discovers that she has an unexpected gift for surgery. Even the repulsive surgeon Mr Racketta has to admit that she is better at this than many men are. Maybe this is the key to her future? Read this fine first novel and find out.
