Changes

|author=Janette Jenkins

|reviewer=John Lloyd

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=978-0701181949

|pages=288

|publisher=Chatto & Windus

|date=January 2012

|summary=A Victorian Vera Drake, as a young malformed girl becomes an abortionist's assistant.

}}

While this might sound like the afterlife of a brilliant and unlikely cabaret mimic, it's not. It's a rich, evocative and engaging novel set in the last years of Victoria's reign, in the depths of her darkest London. Fate - and being abandoned by, in turn, her mother and older sister - leaves Jane Stretch living with and working for a doctor and his lumpen, housebound wife. Jane is alternatively called an 'unfortunate' and a 'cripple' for her disabilities and distorted frame, but she has enough bookish intelligence to pass herself off as an assistant to the doctor, who only ever does one operation - abortions, for music hall artistes. The plot is evidently gearing up to reveal how dangerous such a criminal business might be, for the both of them.

Still, Jenkins does get us into her London very successfully. Research into fabrics, locations, attitudes and more has obviously been done, and yet shows up very lightly. She evokes the character of Jane very well, with a sort of willingly hard-working, yet bemused approach hardened by years of neglectful attitude from countless others. Her story, due to her personality and the wave of enveloping intricacy, is, whatever its small flaws, still worth investigating.

{{commenthead}}