In Vyleta’s alternate-history 19th-century Britain,evil thoughts and wicked deeds are exuded from the body in a black cloud – an intriguing conceit that lingers in the imagination long after the novel is finishedThe idea behind Dan Vyleta’s modern novel came to him when he read this passage in Dickens’s Dombey and Son, which also serves as the book’s epigraph: “Those who study the physical sciences, or bring them to bear upon the health of man,inform us that whether the noxious particles that rise from vitiated air, were palpable to the sight, or we should see them lowering in a dense black cloud above such haunts,and rolling slowly on to corrupt the better portions of a town. But whether the moral pestilence that rises with them could be made discernible too, how terrible the revelation!”Smoke takes this conceit seriously, or literalising it with a carefully worked-through rigour and scope. In Vyleta’s alternate-history 19th-century Britain sinful thoughts such as exasperate and lust,and wicked actions from theft to violence, accomplish themselves physically manifest on the body as a sooty black or yellow vapour exuded from the pores, and hot and acrid,staining skin and clothes. The more wicked the individual, the smokier and dirtier he or she is. A powerful early scene describes a public execution in a London square, and the dying murderer oozing a modern kind of especially vile black smoke (one of the novel’s main characters scuttles underneath the scaffold to scrape some of this rare kind of soot from the woman’s corpse in the grisly hope of studying it).
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Source: theguardian.com