Book review: Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield

The eleventh novel I read in 2015 is Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield.  This was a serendipitous find, as I was walking back to the children's section in Half-Price Books and passed an endcap display featuring several remaindered copies of this novel.  I read Setterfield's first book, The Thirteenth Tale, several years ago -- someone gave it to me, either Leslie or Jennifer, I believe -- and recognized her name on the dust jacket.

As I was searching for an image to paste into the post, I noticed that the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads tended toward either love-it or hate-it, and those who were big fans of The Thirteenth Tale tended not to like Bellman & Black.  I don't think that the ending of either book really pays off, honestly, but I really enjoyed the first half of the book.  The protagonist, William Bellman, and his friends and family members are all truly likeable characters, in the first half of the book, at least, which makes their lives and ultimate fates interesting and affecting, even if the parts they play in the ongoing plot are small ones.

The first half of the book traces the rise of William Bellman from boyhood to manhood through what seems to be a charmed life to early, if not unearned, success in whatever he puts his mind to.  Those closest to him seem to be fated to die young and senselessly, however, culminating in a truly emotionally brutal scarlet fever epidemic that strikes his home town.  The aftermath of the tragedy is the turning point, both of Bellman's life and of the book, and both go downhill from that point, unfortunately.  From being surrounded by a likeable cast, William Bellman becomes a veritable hermit, and the book suffers as a result of his obsession with a mysterious figure whose significance remains unclear, even in the denouement.  There is one moment in the second half where Bellman makes something like a human connection to another character and the reader begins to feel for him again, but it leads nowhere.

Some other reviewers objected to the technical and historical details of the Victorian funeral, which dominate the second half of the book, but frankly, they at least give the author something to communicate in the last 150 pages; and I found them interesting, regardless.  I completed the book still unsure about the import of what is presented as a fateful event in the first chapter: Was Bellman's fate actually affected by it?  Or was it merely a sustained red herring?  I finished the book unsatisfied, but I'd happily read the first half of it over again.