Necropsy -- The Review of Horror Fiction, Summer 2007
"A Corpse Is a Corpse, Of Course" -- June Pulliam
"Although (J.G. Sandom's Confessions of a Teenage Body Snatcher) is published by an imprint that markets books to children and young adults, I am reviewing it here in Necropsy nevertheless. It is something that can be enjoyed by a much wider audience, which is the case with a good deal of young adult fiction of the past twenty years.
"(Sandom's) novel is a complex frame tale very loosely based upon the infamous exploits of those most infamous of resurrection men, Burke and Hare...(Sandom) creates a similar situation in 1831 London. His protagonist, Victor, an Italian lad orphaned at twelve, finds his way to the British Isles by way of being sold to a ship’s captain to be his cabin boy. When Victor breaks his leg at sea while climbing the rigging, the captain declares the child is no longer of any use to anyone and has him thrown overboard. Miraculously Victor survives, and is rescued by a beach comber with enough raw medical skills to set his badly broken limb. But because the man is barely able to feed himself, let alone support Victor, he eventually sells the youth as an apprentice to a man similar to Charles Dickens’ Artful Dodger. This new master trains Victor to be a professional cadger who gives a percentage of the daily alms he begs in the streets to his master in return for his lodging. In this position, Victor has the opportunity to see how the poor of the city are treated and expand his already bountiful store of sympathy for his fellow humans. Victor also learns quickly that begging is not an unskilled job, but a high art, where the most successful of his lot either have an attraction such as a rented taxidermied animal to pose with or are particularly adept at evoking pathos in their marks so that they part with their coins. Some among his fellow cadgers are also able to augment their meager incomes through prostitution.
"Since Victor’s leg healed crookedly, he is still crippled, and is sometimes able to use this disability to his advantage when he begs. It is in this capacity that he comes to the attention of Dr. Quigley, a well-to-do London physician who takes an interest in Victor and re-breaks and re-sets his leg for him free of charge so that he will be able to walk once again without impediment. During Victor’s convalescence, Quigley soon discovers that the lad has a quick mind and instinct for healing in his own right, and puts the idea in Victor’s head that he could become his apprentice and eventually be a physician himself.
"But then Victor discovers how people like Quigley get the bodies they use in their work. As with most tales of resurrection men, there is some tension between the sometimes unsavory deeds that must be performed in the name of the advancement of knowledge vs. the dignity due the dead. But since this tale is being told in the 21st century rather than the 19th, readers have long since given up being disgusted by the idea that human bodies are dissected in the name of medical science, and so the writer must use a new technique to awaken our revulsion at the practice. Robert Wise’s 1945 film The Body Snatcher, as well as Sheri Holman’s 2000 novel The Dress Lodger, use the device of the anatomy student (or teacher) being forced through convoluted circumstances to dissect the body of someone they knew well, thus rejuvenating our primordial sense of outrage about the fate of the dead. And both The Body Snatcher (Wise’s film and the 1884 Robert Louis Stevenson short story of the same name on which it is based) and (Confessions of a Teenage Body Snatcher) venture into Burke and Hare territory to enflame our sense of moral outrage.
"When Victor confronts the man ultimately responsible for creating a market for the immorally procured cadavers, he responds that his actions are justified in order to further medical science, and that the unfortunate “Burked” individuals were nothing more than cadgers. Without giving away too much, as this is fiction, the good end happily while the bad end badly...(Confessions of a Teenage Body Snatcher) is a well-written story, and the author (and perhaps the author’s publisher too) demonstrates faith in the target audience’s intelligence, as there is no deus ex machina to explain the term “resurrection man,” and words like “cadger,” that are generally not used in the United States, are not Americanized the way some words were changed in earlier editions of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter’s novels. The writer instead has enough faith that the reader will understand these things or even take the radical step of consulting a dictionary when in doubt."
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