Paul West is an Englishman now in his early sixties, who emigrated to the United States in 1962 and now lives in New York State. His thirteenth novel is the first to be published in Britain, and it arrives surrounded by an honour-laden reputation which has also spread to France, by way of his two previous novels Rat Man of Paris and Lord Byron's Doctor. The territory he inhabits as novelist, poet and polemicist has recently been plotted in colourful detail by the French press, which traces his ancestry to Rabelais by way of the Elizabethans, and notes the significance of his professorial chair as a successor to Nabokov. His pugnacious critical position, as a scourge of the Carver-inspired school of "minimalist" fiction, has apparently earned him the nickname "Maximalist Rex".

The Women of Whitechapel purports to be the inside story of Jack the Ripper, and his victims; and it is based on the theory, explored in recent books and films, which attributes the murders to an Establishment conspiracy. It proceeds from the supposition that Queen Victoria's son, the young Prince Edward, has fathered an illegitimate daughter by a Catholic shopgirl, who is bundled off to a madhouse to keep the matter quiet. Four of the murdered prostitutes were co-signatories of a letter demanding hush-money from the Palace, and the royal physician William Gull is called on to silence the would-be blackmailers. His methodical eviscerations, by surgical razor, conform to masonic ritual.

Readers unfamiliar with Ripper theory may be intrigued enough to persevere with it, as a melodramatic thriller. But we are warned in a preface that the story appeals to West mainly as "a true merchant of the untrue"; and the element that seems to be his main criminological contribution is probably the most preposterous. The lynch-pin of his version proves to be the painter Walter Sickert, who appears as a pimp to the bi-sexual brothel-cruisings of his chum Prince "Eddy", and an accomplice to murder.

The pigments of the novel are more grimy and lurid than any Sickert canvas. "London was a dunghill and the royal family stood atop it crowing" is the radical aperçu behind the swarming tableau of eminent and obscure Victorians whose bodily functions and secret perversions are continually made to stand for waste and corruption in the body politic. The most loquacious of the prostitutes is Marie Kelly, an Irish sex-aid vendor modelled shamelessly on Molly Bloom whose wet-daydreams issue in a macaronic Cockney packed with synonyms for her funnel, gutter pie, oyster, muffin, holster snatch or rabbit-hole.

The artist's reluctant partnership with the ice-hearted doctor allows West to revive some dusty fin-de-siècle arguments between art and science and ethics; and he shows some insight into the psychology of guilt. But the themes soon turn to mush in a witches' brew of ribaldry and horripilation, that betrays more than a soupçon of misogyny; and its fluid is a very curious brand of mock-Gothic prose that churns out puns, conceits and quotations, with scant regard for register. ("I want something good period" muses Kelly, "By gum I want my period. Where does the comma go, then?") It would be easy to take it all as self-conscious pastiche, if it were at least competent; but the felicities lose out heavily to the preciosities, which often sound like a translator's howlers' ("beds enveloped him in cuddly mummery"); and the rhetorical flights too often collapse into bathos, or sheer nonsense.