Darkness and Disorder Inside Him: Ian McGuire’s The Abstainer as Neo-Victorian Crime Fiction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202611437Keywords:
Ian Mc Guire, The Abstainer, detective fiction, neo-Victorian fiction, ethicsAbstract
Like its 2016 breakthrough predecessor, The North Water, The Abstainer (2020), Ian McGuire’s latest novel, is set in Victorian England. It features a serial killer, a flawed detective protagonist in pursuit of the villain and a final thriller-like encounter between them. However, the genre of its narration differs —revolving around a police detective chasing a criminal— and so do the psychological profiles of the pursuer and the pursued, the motivation behind their acts and the mood of the story’s resolution. Moreover, the employment of central adversaries who are, to some extent, similar to each other challenges a clear-cut borderline between good and evil, right and wrong. This article thus argues that, by subverting the generic schemes of the Victorian detective novel, raising ethical questions concerning the gulf between Self and Other, and addressing concerns relevant to present-day readers’ sensibility, The Abstainer represents a noteworthy contribution to the body of contemporary Neo-Victorian crime fiction.
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