Jack the Ripper is a bit like the Boojum. Like that most invisible and most threatening of all the varieties of Snark in Lewis Carroll's famous poem, he lurks blank and ravenous at the end of the hunt, and it is an unlucky Bellman who runs across his likeness in the flesh. The most famous murderer in the world, he remains unexposed, a phantom of the London fog, and it may be just as well that the many writers who continue to search for his true identity will, almost certainly, never prove that they have found it. The stench of the Ripper's crimes is perhaps more salutary when the banality of evil behind them remains unplumbed.

Certainly the lessons Paul West hopes to impart in his new novel, The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, have little or nothing to do with any attempt to come up with a new candidate for the murderer. In his short preface he acknowledges several sources for the choice he has made, chief among them Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper (1976), a rather breathless nonfiction attempt to pin the role mainly upon Dr. William Gull, physician and lobotomist at Guy's Hospital, with assists from the painter Walter Sickert (1860–1942); the choice of Gull as Jack the Ripper also impels Iain Sinclair's fine, dark, surreal, London-obsessed White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel West may not have come across, as he does not acknowledge it.

Following Knight, West places the beginning of the whole tragedy several years before 1888. The young Duke of Clarence, second in line to the throne, falls in love with a Catholic working-class woman, marries her, has a child by her. In all of this he is aided and abetted by Sickert, a painter long since famous for his louring brown palette, for his interest in the stews and brothels of East London, and for his obsession with the violent deaths of prostitutes. But the 1880s are a decade of social upheaval, the vast empire has finally begun to show signs of wear; and for Queen Victoria and the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, her grandson Eddie's sexual fling in the slums dangerously weakens the fabric of an established order already under threat. So the young lovers are forcibly separated. The duke's young wife is lobotomized by Salisbury's fellow Mason, William Gull. The daughter is abducted. Sickert observes all, with loathing and vicarious arousal.

But the whore who has been nursing the duke's daughter will not stay quiet. Her name is Marie Kelly. Along with three cronies, she signs a blackmailing letter to the Queen. Salisbury asks Gull to deal with the problem, not guessing that Gull will himself, along with a vicious coachman and the protesting but fascinated Sickert, seek the four whores out and kill them, terribly mutilating their bodies. And the Ripper is born. He is not a man but a gang, whose members represent the gilded ceremonial facade of the Victorian age at its height, but whose actions demonstrate, in the most graphic way possible, the terrible cost of maintaining that facade. And Sickert—the central character of this extremely long novel—spends the rest of his life nursing the obscenity he has become.

That this story is in general a piece of historical nonsense—and that it calumniates Walter Sickert in particular—seems not to bother West in the slightest. Nor should it, perhaps. Nonsense or not, Stephen Knight's was, after all, a scintillating version of the Ripper myth. Lurid and comprehensive, it was a prism through which an entire world could be seen to expose itself. If West had been able to retell this tale with anything of the urgency of his source, then The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper might have been a classic elegy for a dying world, a classic analysis of obsession and evil, a classic celebration of the green shoot of life.

Unfortunately, it is nothing of the sort. West recounts the terrible events at the heart of his book with a tangible twice-told ennui, concentrating his creative energy instead on a series of internal monologues meant to recreate the protagonists' minds in a flow of humanizing prose poetry. Some of these passages are clever, many are sensitive, but all exhibit a self-regarding expertise of verbalizing that drowns the cast in words; despite the occasional brilliant page of dialogue, the unrelenting sonorous gush of the book becomes, in the end, nearly unbearable.

To no avail is James Joyce's Molly Bloom evoked in Marie Kelly's flow of unspoken thoughts, for Molly Bloom was the words she dreamed, and Marie Kelly sounds very much more like Paul West than any East End whore in 1886. And after hundreds of pages of soft-edged pudgy-minded "impressionist" matter, Sickert himself seems no more than doleful. In the banality of daylight, the Ripper turns into a sentimental bore. Drowning Sickert and The Women of Whitechapel in regrets, West has fatally domesticated the dark fable of the Ripper, and in doing so has ignored a central lesson. If you think you've found the Boojum, what you've found is no longer the Boojum.