Customer Reviews

Metropolis: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In its essence, Metropolis is a love story between a German immigrant in NYC in the late 1800's and the teenage wife of the Irish gang leader.

Though earnest, honest, and hard-working, Harris is on the run from the law for a crime he didn't commit. The Irish gang takes him to use for their own nefarious purposes, and assigns Beatrice the job of turning him into a credible Irishman to avoid the police and other gangs.

The story is minutely researched, and brings in real people from the era, including the main character himself, mentioned in David McCullough's "The Great Bridge" as a worker who fell off the Brooklyn Bridge during construction and lived. The historical detail is used well, adding a strong sense of an almost magical place of heroic bridges overhead, secret sewer tunnels below, an era of vicious but honorable gangs counterbalancing the venality of the police and municipal adminstration. But Gaffeny never gets bogged down in these details, using them only to complement the intertwined stories of Harris and Beatrice.

The novel reminded me of "A Winter's Tale" by Mark Helprin, about a thief and set during the same period, and obviously pulls extensive detail from "The Gangs of NY."

Overall, very enjoyable to read and highly recommended.

There is much to be admired in the 450 pages of Metropolis, a story of post Civil War New York. Unfortunately, the admirable would have fitted into 200 odd pages, leaving the reader wading through an extra half a book. Gaffney's done her research. Unlike Kevin Baker's hyperkinetic Dreamland, Gaffney does a fine job sorting 19th Century New York myths from reality. If only she'd been harder on herself. Too often you'll find a moment of genuine drama slowed to an unbearable pace. For instance, Gaffney reckons the middle of a life-threatening fire is a good time for a quick literary tour of Barnum's circus. Instead of reading on, this reader thought the fire was a fine place to put the book down for the night. In other words, Gaffney doesn't know when to let the story flow and when to occasionally indulge herself. It makes the book seem heavier than it should be, unravelling all the months of research that must have gone into it. Yet it's hard to forgive an author who strives so hard for historical realism and then punctures her own balloon with anachronisms. Would a stable hand really think that he 'identified' with a horse 150 years ago? Whichever editor let this book slip out should have their fingers rapped. Another few months of work might have produced something memorable, but you get the feeling that a book this heavy can only sink like a stone.

While slogging through some 450 pages of "Metropolis", the reader may wonder exactly what Elizabeth Gaffney is trying to convey in this plodding saga of post-Civil War New York City. At its core, it is the tale of a young German immigrant on the lam after being framed in the arson of P.T. Barnum's American Museum. He soon finds himself in the throws of the "Whyos", a secret Irish gang of New York's infamous Five Points, through which he finds work first on a road crew, later as a sewer man of New York's famed subterranean maze, and finally as a member of the construction crew building the Brooklyn Bridge. Such ambitious fare certainly holds much promise for the historical novel fan, but Gaffney clutters the plot and the history with a ham handed dose of feminism and related social topics. To make matters worse, the utopian Whyos who, we are to believe, have maintained their stealth and secrecy by communicating through a complex language of song. While Gaffney portrays the Whyos as tough and ruthless, these ludicrous singing bandits seem closer to "The West Side Story" than to "The Gangs of New York." Our young German hero - let's call him Frank Harris - the last of his several aliases - falls in love with the redoubtable Beatrice: pickpocket, whore, sometime murderer, and mol of the Whyos boss. But in Gaffney's New York, girls like Beatrice are the salt of society, the true brains and fabric of both legal and illegal New York, held back only by men and the puritanical Victorian social mores of the day.

The book could have survived all of this, were it not for Gaffney's total lack of atmosphere, suspense, or pace in the story. Fires, explosions, murders, are conveyed with the drama of a Brooklyn Bridge machinery technical manual, and while despite endless pages describing the thoughts and feeling of Frank and Beatrice, they stir as much inspiration as a trip with Gaffney through New York's sewers.

From the breathless praise lavished by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and others, "Metropolis" was a novel I was really looking forward to devouring. It is unfortunate that this book was so well received critically, but I suspect the reviewers were more enthralled with Gaffney's oh-so politically correct social commentary than in any true literary or entertainment talent. Boring, disjointed, and unfocused, in the final analysis "Metropolis" is a good book to leave on the trolley.

I'm a fan of historical fiction set in New York. I loved Paradise Alley and Dreamland, so this seemed to fall in place especially after reading some of the editorial reviews. However, it's not Paradise Alley or Dreamland.

I really had difficulty buying into the idea of a gang communicating through singing, humming, or whatever they called it. The scene in which the Whyos and WhyNots "began their work, each one trasmitting his or her message to a specific jury member via signals that were barely audible, barely even distinguishable from their breath" was just too much to believe. And then when the heroine Beatrice begins "transmitting so subtly that none of them even realized she was doing it" I began to wonder if I was reading science fiction.

The dirt, smells, and sounds of old NYC seem to have been deeply researched: Barnum's entertainment, the city sewers, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the early gangs. I don't understand why then the author created such unbelieveable characters and circumstances. Beatrice's escape from the gang, Harris' miraculous fall from the bridge, the inheritance from Mr. Noe are all just too contrived for really good historical fiction.

I enjoyed this novel. It is well-written, mixes history and possibility in a style broadly similar to The Crimson Petal, and the White.
The story is as much about New York as it is about the characters who glide, stride or bustle across the pages.
We see the best, and the worst, of the people and the metropolis they inhabit. Opportunities are seized, opportunism abounds.
We leave the main characters poised on the brink of a hopeful and successful future. I wanted more.

After about 50 pages, I felt drawn in. After 90, I was fully hooked. I liked the tactile portrayal of old New York, its skeletal structure and pungent smells. When the book's hero begins navigating the secret tunnels of the sewer system, the details feel just right and the story seems to gain narrative power. The book's opening is unsteady, as if to mirror the disorientation of a fresh immigrant like our main protagonist. He is repeatedly misjudged, misled, and mistaken. He keeps changing his own name. Despair looms, and almost snuffs out luck and timing. Yet the story has a sure traction, and I felt I had to know what was going to happen next.

I might have guessed from the book's cover that our hero would graduate to a job building the Brooklyn Bridge, with its architectural majesty and construction nightmares, a striking symbol of the striving New Yorkers in the Tweed-and-gang era. Gaffney evidently loves the bridge, and plays with it as a fitting counterpoint to the sprawling sewers. She's a fine writer. I felt more than willing to roll with her jolty chronological sidesteps. They make her story feel somewhat old-fashioned and mildly idiosyncratic at the same time. And she creates lots of appealing, intriguing characters. My own favorites were Meg Dolan, Queen Mother of the stealthy gang that is the muscle of this story, and Luther Undertoe, the wayward soul and antichrist. All the book's characters battle serious physical challenges of daily life in the 1870s. Their emotional paths move in multifarious directions for unknowable reasons. They are rendered human, and we are watchers. Grateful ones.

As an author who has written about New York's seminal street gangs, I found the premise of 'Metropolis' irresistible. A German immigrant with a shadowy past is wrongly accused of torching Barnum's circus, resulting in a nationwide manhunt. The Whyos gang shields him from the law by giving him the new identity of Frank Harris, but for a price: he has to get a job as a sewer man and map the city's maze of underground tunnels, which would make ideal escape routes. Danger lurks in the form of Luther Undertoe, the villainous opportunist who really set the circus fire and wants to see Harris swing for it. To complicate matters, Harris falls in love with Beatrice O'Gamnha, a tough and spirited member of the Why Nots, the gang's female auxiliary.

Gaffney's portrait of 1870s New York City is rich and engaging. The strongest passages in 'Metropolis' depict the terrors and tribulations of the working and forsaken classes: the industrial accidents in the sewers and on the Brooklyn Bridge building site hammer home the fact that workers' rights were secondary to profit, and a Why Not's decision to kill her newborn girl to spare it the agony of growing up female in the Five Points comes across as not only justifiable, but natural.

Packed with more twists and turns than a Five Points street map, 'Metropolis' suggests that Elizabeth Gaffney has a real future in historical fiction writing. While not as evocative of old New York as Jack Finney's 'Time and Again' or as rich in character development as Caleb Carr's 'The Alienist', 'Metropolis' has what one reviewer called "brawn and brains and heart".

This is a coming to America story with gangs and rats and grit.

It could have been fabulous, unfortunately in my opinion it wasn't very good. I have to say that I agree with the many criticism noted by other readers. I found a distracting inconsistency of style in the writing.

I did not dislike the meticulously detailed style when the author was writing about the sewers, building roads and construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. But unfortunately when writing about the emotions and personalities of her characters there seemed to be a lack of details.

I never felt like I knew these characters, they never truly came to life under Gaffney's pen. I didn't like or dislike them, there just wasn't enough of them to get a sense of their true characters.

The premise that the gang known as the Whyos would communicate by whistle and song was stretched beyond believable when it was explained inside the courtroom during the trial at the end of the story.

Gaffney created this very tightly woven story with many details to hold it together but at the end it seems the rules no longer apply and the story completely falls apart.

Love historical fiction. And this book did not let me down. It was definitely one that I looked forward to picking back up!

I like the notion of violent gangsters chosen for their vocal pitch. I like the idea of the sewermen in the municipal bath house, and their fear of the "ghost", the very human way they justify its existence even though the truth is painfully self-evident. I like the way the plot hovers just above mystical and supernatural. I like the juxtaposition of song versus gore, bridge versus sewer, poverty versus wealth (and so on- it is a book of extremes). Does it have to be absolutely plausible to be a fascinating story? For my money, this "guy gets girl" saga is stronger for its whimsical elements. Some concepts in the book will make me pay more attention, now, to the sounds in the city. Is that really a screeching cat? Or could it be a pomaded, red-lipped, axe-blade-booted killer communicating with his lackeys?