Rating 3/5

This review has been a long time coming, and not just because I finished this book in the middle of last month and have only just gotten around to writing about it. The Ruby in the Smoke, and the rest of the Sally Lockhart series, played a prominent feature on my childhood bookhelf, along with Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights Trilogy, and to my shame I never finished any of them. Although Pullman’s novels are often aimed at the late childhood/young adult market, I’ve only truly begun to appreciate his storytelling as an adult. The Ruby in the Smoke never panders to its younger audience, nor shields them from a series of gruesome and unusual deaths, drug use and addiction, ranging in locations from the seediest underbelly of Victorian London and the furthest reaches of the British Empire. Sally’s world is revealed at a breakneck speed, which leaves you little time to reflect in the novel’s 207 pages. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel that adult readers are rarely treated to such a crisp slice of Neo-Victorianism, as the contemporary adult historical fiction market favours the epics of The Essex Serpent to the succinct brevity of description achieved by Pullman in this novel.

Indeed, it was strange, and did strike me at first as childish, to see Pullman write on many occasions about what was going to happen, directly before it happens, as a way of tantalising readers to carry on. By the second paragraph we have met the novel’s protagonist Sally Lockhart and know that ‘within fifteen minutes she [is] going to kill a man’ (pg 7). I read that sentence over and over as a child, knowing that something exciting was about to happen, but yet somehow still not being able to get any further than that line. This time though, I persevered, knowing that this couldn’t be entirely true of our heroine, and was not disappointed to see how events in the first chapter actually did turn out after all these years.

I began to realise as the novel progressed that it’s the unwavering nature of Sally’s good character (I use term loosely, although always morally just, she isn’t above a criminal act or ten), her strong determinism juxtaposed against murky world she inhabits, that is the key ingredient to anchor the reader into a story of so many different subplots and mysteries as The Ruby in the Smoke is.

Although I was pleasantly surprised to have not guessed the biggest twist in Sally’s story, the real events behind the traumatic nightmares from her childhood, I had to bring this book down from my original rating of 4/5 due to the sheer number of implausible things that happen in the last twenty pages or so. I feel like Pullman could have done with another chapter or two to tie up all the loose ends suitably, by giving the revelation Sally’s history longer to unfurl like the opium smoke that triggers her memory, rather than just bouncing from one shock to another like the stories in the pulp magazines that Sally’s young charge Jim devours.

Despite this, The Ruby in the Smoke was an enjoyable bit of childhood nostalgia for me, and I’ll be looking out for the rest of the series at second hand book shops in the future (I feel like the prize is just that much sweeter if you can find the exact edition you would have had from the time, rather than the latest reprint!).

Are there any books that you were meant to read in your childhood that you’d like to give a second chance now? Let me know what you think! Zoe x