Peter Doyle

On St. Helena island in 1821 a mysterious doctor removes Napoleon Bonapartes penis from his corpse while in the next room his loyal lieutenants brag about their dead emperors merciless cruelty. Fifty years later the search for this itinerant appendage leads through Victorian London to ante-bellum New York, Amherst, Massachusetts, and finally Colorado Territory, dragging in its path a promiscuous mix of French counts, love-sick poets, dandies, shady antiquarians, utopian dreamers, con men, and a pieced-together homunculus named Bonnie. The French want to re-member their empire, the English relic-seekers wish to recover a valuable prize, and Bonnie wants to complete his diminutive body. Along the way, John Vernon corrects historys mistake by arranging a meeting between the two great American poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. And Whitmans friend, Peter Doyle, the dandified streetcar conductor at the center of it all, saves the lives of a family abducted by Indians with an ingenious use of Napoleons dingus, as he calls it. From the half-completed Brooklyn Bridge to Horace Greeleys Union Colony in Colorado Territory to the Rocky Mountains and the canyons of the Green and Yampa rivers, this sprawling novel creates its own manifest destiny by mixing fact and fiction with shameless joy. Peter Doyles brand of speculative historical fiction corrects historys minor errors while vividly describing its major ones.PraiseVernons great virtue is his stylesmart, marvelously specific, insightful both about large issues and small ones. The novel contains a wealth of fine sentences, and a wealth of sharply delineated objects. Reading it is rather like going into the worlds best and most fascinating antique store and watching everything, on every shelf, in every drawer, draped over every rack, be made new again. This is not a novel to be devoured, but to be browsed over and savored. Jane Smiley, The Boston GlobePeter Doyle is not just a novel, its a conjurationa darkly comic, exciting, cant-put-it-down, joyous chase of a book. Twisting and turning from history to fantasy, from picaresque to romance, from Europe to Colorado, this is a grand old stem-winder told with great zest, invention, and flair. Ron HansenVernon is a superb writer, and most of Peter Doyle is a thrill to read. Here is a funhouse-mirror distortion of American dreams, American eccentricities, and American tragedies, offered with sly purpose and cracked wisdom. The San Francisco ChronicleA magical mystery tour of the 1870s and 80s, from a memorably squalid New York to the wide-open spaces of the Colorado Territory. . . . A furiously bubbling stew of all manner of ingredients, a grab bag stuffed to the bursting point with the real and the invented. Angela Carter, The New York Times Book Review