Alice B Toklas is dead. Her bones are buried next to Gertrude Stein’s remains in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris but Alice’s soul resides in the body of a feral cat. She is in exciting company as the souls of celebrities as famous and accomplished as Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Maria Callas, Colette, Isadora Duncan, Heloise and Abelard, La Fontaine, Frederic Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Proust and a host of other cultural luminaries wander the cemetery, also in the bodies of cats. Each of these personages has changed only in form - their personalities are intact: they love and hate and lust after all that they did in their previous life.
Poor Alice wants Gertrude but Gertrude’s soul has not yet found a feline host and the story begins to heat up when Alice sets a giant midnight orgy in motion, headed by the silent, slightly menacing but intoxicatingly sexy tomcat, Jim Morrison. Will the dozens of kittens born to the Pere Lachaise community two months hence yield up a new Gertrude? And who among the inhabitants is stealing body parts and trinkets? Who is opening letters and revealing secrets?
Waiting for Gertrude by Bill Richardson is a cleverly conceived, original and ultimately unclassifiable novel. If I were shelving this book in a library, I’d be spoiled for choice. It is part fable and Jean de La Fontaine, the original 17th century fabulist, himself a cat, chronicles, in mocking fashion, the goings-on in the community. It is part epistolary novel with letters flying from Oscar to Jim, Colette to her mother and also to Jim, Isadora to Modigliani. Waiting for Gertrude is part journal: many entries are penned by Alice who provides the reader with local colour and helps progress the plot. The book shares tropes with crime novels. It is certainly a romance where both consummated and unrequited love feature. It is a bedroom farce marked by mistaken identities and sexual innuendo, light pornography features as does the occasional slamming of doors and the “beating of hasty retreats” at just the right moment. But most of all, Waiting for Gertrude is a neo-gothic tale. It is subtitled a “graveyard gothic” and while it is comic and light of touch and not particularly scary, the usual elements that define a gothic novel are all there: omens and curses, the supernatural, nightmares, a mustachioed villain, a damsel (or two) in distress and a happy ending. If I were a librarian I would place Waiting for Gertrude on the “highly recommended” shelf with a tag that suggests it be read on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
