Philip Pullman – The Tiger in the Well

124. The Tiger in the Well by Philip Pullman (1991)
Sally Lockhart Mysteries, Book 3

Read my review of:
– Book 1: The Ruby in the Smoke
– Book 2: The Shadow in the North

Read By: Anton Lesser
Length: 13h 09m (416 pages)

Genre: Historical Fiction; Mystery

Started: 09 October 2008
Finished: 14 October 2008

Man she’s never met’s
trying to take her baby
and the law’s helping.

Summary: Picking up more than two years after the events of The Shadow in the North, the beginning of this book finds Sally Lockhart living a happy – if unconventional – Victorian life. She has a daughter, Harriet, whom she loves, good friends she can count on, and a successful financial consulting business. Then she’s served papers suing her for divorce and custody of their child from a Mr. Parrish – a man she’s never met, let alone married, and who certainly isn’t Harriet’s father. Parrish has a string of airtight evidence to show that they are married, however, and the law is clearly on his side. If Sally wants to keep her daughter, she must slip into the darker side of London, rife with poverty, disease, crime, socialist agitators, and a conspiracy designed to victimize Jewish immigrants, and keep herself and her daughter safe until she can figure out who Parrish is – and what he wants with her.

Review: I had given up on the Sally Lockhart series by the end of The Shadow in the North – I liked the characters quite a lot, the writing was excellent, and they evoked Victorian London in all of its damp, gritty, filthy glory. However, my problem was plotting – The Ruby in the Smoke had a well-built and exciting mystery but a terribly rushed denouement, and The Shadow in the North just bored me. However, a friend convinced me to read the rest of the series, and I’m so glad I did. The Tiger in the Well is easily the best of the three, with a fantastic plot that grabbed me right at the beginning, and didn’t let go until the end. Even though I figured out who the ultimate bad guy was relatively early on, that didn’t lessen my enjoyment of the novel at all. The sense of menace and suspense in this novel is palpable in practically every paragraph; it was terrifying watching Sally have her life dismantled around her, not by a villain by but the legal workings of the system, unable to turn to anyone for help and unable – by virtue of being a woman in a time when women’s rights were laughably nonexistant – to even help herself.

There’s also some deeper political and social commentary going on in the secondary sub-plots regarding immigration (particularly of Jews), socialism, and some degree of moral responsibility. It gets a smidge on the preachy side sometimes, but for the whole it was worked into the main story quite well. I listened to this book compulsively, finishing it in less than a week, and actually wanting to go do one of the more tedious parts of my job, just so I’d have an excuse to listen. Even though I was pretty sure I’d figured out the overarching mystery, I was intensely absorbed because the suspense is so well-built that I simply couldn’t see a way for Sally to save herself and for everything to turn out all right. And, to be fair, there’s a deus-ex-machina-element to the ending, but not as much as one might think – and all of the various subplots resolve into an extremely satisfying end. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: This book could actually work fairly well as a stand-alone, although of course your understanding is going to be deeper if you read the series in order. The Tiger in the Well is far and away the best of the bunch, though. Recommended for all those who like historical fiction and/or Philip Pullman’s writing.

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First Line: One sunny morning in the autumn of 1881, Sally Lockhart stood in the garden and watched her little daughter play, and thought that things were good.