Customer Reviews

Tom Bedlam

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

 

 

Dickens fans will feel immediately at home in Hagen's Victorian London among a cast of colorful characters in a story rife with fateful coincidence, poverty, riches and the corruption power can bring.

Tom Bedlam is a boy to root for, an urchin who toils alongside his bafflingly saintly mother in a smoke-and-dust-belching porcelain factory run by a grasping man who gives Mrs. Bedlam a pair of his wife's cast-off shoes and then docks her pay for them.

At nine Tom has never met his father and, given his mother's firm belief that "if you can't speak pleasantly about a person, it's best to say nothing at all," knows nothing about the man either. Then one day he hears an unfamiliar step on the tenement stair. (Tom "identified the footsteps of his neighbors in the same way a country boy quickly distinguishes the call of a wren from that of a curlew.")

A handsome, rakish actor, Tom's father quickly tricks Tom into giving up the location of his mother's hard-won savings - money for the boy's education - and once again disappears into the London streets.

Something goes out of Emily Bedlam after that and though she lives on until Tom is half grown, cracks appear in her saintly demeanor. On her deathbed she reveals the existence of Tom's missing, presumed dead, elder brother, and also directs Tom to reconcile with her father, a wealthy brewer who disowned her when she married William Bedlam.

In this way Tom is rescued from the bowels of the factory. After a tearful, parting from the cheerful, chaotic Limpkin family - tenement neighbors with too many children - Tom goes to boarding school, where a ruthless pecking order holds sway and Tom makes a friend - a new, possibly insane boy who refuses to conform.

Tragedy and comedy continue to commingle as Tom matures enough to realize the true nature of love, but not enough to recognize the value of patience and selflessness. He goes on to study medicine in Scotland, opens a practice in South Africa where he embarks on a contented family life, becomes a medic in the Boer War, struggles with fatherhood and greets WWI with horror as it threatens to engulf his children.

The plot's direction and momentum derive from several of Tom's fateful decisions. The first of these is forced upon him after a boyhood tragedy. Pressed to choose self-preservation and personal gain over honesty, Tom acquiesces and is haunted by his choice thereafter.

Less clear-cut choices - the products of pique, wounded pride, impulse, and earnest, well-meaning wrong-headedness - steer him through marriage, career and parenthood.

Fate and coincidence, as in any Dickensian tale, play strong, marvelous roles, and Tom sees his past come back to haunt him more than a few times. Despite one or two places where Tom's actions or motivations defy belief, the story's shape has a satisfying architecture.

The secondary characters - from Tom's odious, transparent father, and William Bedlam's doom-preaching faithful companion, to the lovely and sensible Audrey Limpkin and Tom's wise, absent-minded Scottish professor - contribute greatly to the comedy, the villainy, and the virtue without seeming utilitarian or two-dimensional. The writing pays homage to the sly wit and grace of Dickens while shunning the 19th-century fashion for wordiness.

An absorbing page-turner fleshed out with strong period detail and the bustle of advancing progress, Hagen's second novel (after "The Laments") satisfies the yen for a good yarn.

This book grabbed me from the first sentence: "It is quite possible that Emily Bedlam was simply a very good woman, but to her son, Tom, she appeared insane." The novel follows Tom's career - his life, loves, and family - from late-Victorian England though boarding school to Scotland, Boer South Africa, and the adventures of his daughters and son in WW I England and France.

It is the story of one man's (Tom's) journey, from child to parent. In plot, it owes much to Victorian conventions of coincidence, lost relatives, and hidden connections. In diction and sensibility, though, it is closer to the picaresque novel of the 18th century. It is most notable, however, for what it is not: there is no postmodern irony here, just a 21st-century entertainment that is told by a superbly gifted author who writes like a cross between Dickens and Fielding. Highly recommended!

Recently I've adopted as part of my personal philosophy this small notion: 'Every situation has its ceiling.'

That is, unless you drastically change some of its variables, every situation -every relationship, every endeavour, every STORY- can only rise so high.

Witness 'Tom Bedlam'.

There should be no doubt as to the 'Dickensian' intents of this novel. (Whereas Hagen's début was more Irving-esque) But whatever his goals -and only the author can say what these were- 'Bedlam' does not achieve anything close to what to this reader believes was possible. But then, were that to have happened, some pretty substantive elements would have to have changed.

There were times when I felt that Hagen was writing with one hand tied behind his back, the result was that...well...hindered. It was all there, the characters, the scope, the setting...and yet for whatever reason, he flubbed the effort.

It is, at various points, a delight to read. But mostly it is 'thin'. Entirely lacking of substance. It feels 'unfinished'. Or perhaps, though I don't believe this, it was beyond his abilities. (I prefer to believe his editor was not sufficiently diligent. Or demanding)

For those fans of the genre, it's an entertaining enough distraction. But I still believe that Mr. Hagen's best work is yet to come.

Tom Bedlam is an epic only in the sense that it covers four generations of one family, and it is picaresque only in the sense that its protagonist does have some adventures, but both adjectives are too weighty to describe this light fare. Without much literary merit, this story is fun reading, in the same way that a soap opera does have its entertaining aspects. The characters lead interesting lives, but are one-dimensional. Hagen assigns a dominant character trait to each, and then uses the trait to explain most of the character's actions; nothing very complex there. The description of Victorian London rings true, but when the story moves to South Africa, we are provided with little local color or appreciation of the time or place. While the story moves quickly and boredom does not have time to set in, the last chapters contain a string of coincidences so improbable, that they can only be viewed as plot artifices needed to end the book without leaving any loose ends. There's nothing wrong with reading an entertaining story, except that at the end, I felt that I could have spent my reading time better.

The first part of this novel was a good description of poverty in late Victorian London, England. It has a real sense of place and time. I was reminded a bit of A.J. Cronin.

We follow the life of Tom Bedlam in what the blurb writers usually describe as a "sweeping family saga." Bit formulaic. Then, the coincidences start to appear. Character after character from Tom's past turn up in his later life. Just too many of them to be credible.

From his difficult early days as a poverty-stricken youth in London to his later years as a physician in South Africa and father of four children, Tom Bedlam is marked by the experiences of his formative years with a sickly, struggling mother, the equally poor neighbors in their tenement, the Limpkins, and the Shakespearean actor-cum-reprobate, William Bedlam, Tom's father. Doing his best to honor his father, Tom is hard-pressed when the man appears in his life only to steal the mother's hidden savings or to insinuate himself into the boy's future. When Tom's mother dies, William steps in to claim control of the funds supplied by the youth's maternal grandfather, intruding on Tom's every opportunity for education while demanding recompense for his troubles.

Through painful years in a boy's school, Tom receives an education that prepares him for the harsh realities of the world and discovers a boy he believes might be his long lost brother, only to lose him to an indifferent society. After a shady deal brokered by his father that goes against the young man's conscience, Tom attends medical school in Scotland, leaving London and the Limpkins behind, as well as the girl he loves, Audrey Limpkin, who must provide for her siblings. Struggle is a familiar state for Tom and despite the many disappointments he endures, it is in his nature to forge ahead; he applies himself to his studies, falls in love with two women and begins life in South Africa as a physician. After years of moderate success and four children, Tom is relatively happy, although he has lasting regrets about the woman he left behind in London.

While raising his children and tending to their varied needs, an old tragedy continues to haunt Tom, but he must content himself with what is possible to achieve and leave regrets to the past. Unable to locate the brother given away at birth by a selfish father, Tom nurtures a faint hope that someday they will meet, but fate is indeed cruel in this regard. It is only after two wars, the divergent lives of his eccentric children and the denouement of a near-hopeless search that Tom finds contentment. Never favored by circumstance, Hagan's protagonist is a reflection of an evolving, status-conscious society and his chronic lack of resources, a tenacious soul who craves family and connection, but is given little that he does not achieve on his own. Ranging from the slums of London to medical school in Scotland, war-torn Paris to rural South Africa, the scope of the novel far exceeds Tom's humble beginnings, a man on the cusp of a changing world beset by war and social turmoil, personal loss challenging Tom's courage and integrity. Tom Bedlam's adventures mirror the times, an essentially good man in a new century, the constraints of poverty cast aside for a more satisfying future. Luan Gaines/2007.

Geroge Hagen must be a Dickens fan, since he names his characters for their physical or emotional attributes. Tom Bedlam, indeed! That being said, he is a pretty good writer, and this book is certainly not a waste of time. Though I must admit I finished it only because a friend recommended it to me, and I didn't want to lie when he asked if I'd read it.