Louis Bayard's newest novel answers with wit and skill a question no one in the last two centuries has seriously bothered to ask. Whatever happened to Tiny Tim?

I mean, after Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" ends ÷ what happens to Tim? I know no one asked because no one cared, but now is finally the time to care and the time to ask. The answer rests in the prettily faux-antiqued pages of "Mr. Timothy."

To begin with, Tim isn't at all tiny anymore. He's 23, boarding in an upscale whorehouse in London, and coping with the recent death of his father. Timothy suffers more from the disillusionment of youth than he does from his still crippled leg.

In an early passage, both funny and exemplary of the engaging style with which the entire book is crafted, Timothy describes his unsteady walk, a souvenir of his childhood handicap:

"All that's left, really, is the limp, which to hear others tell it is not a limp but a lilt, a slight hesitation my right leg makes before greeting the pavement, a metrical shyness. Uncle N told me once to call it a caesura, but this produced looks of such profound unknowing I quickly gave it up. I refer to it now as my stride."

Timothy exists in the famously wretched world of 19th century London. He makes extra money by dredging dead bodies from the Thames, taking their valuables and selling the corpses.

Sexuality is perverse and uncomfortable in this world. The book manages to capture the sexuality adults project onto children in a way that both discomforts the reader and expresses the callousness of a time when the sexual age of consent was 13 and women often had no sure means of income beyond prostitution.

The discomfort of the human body is a throbbing constant throughout the novel. Not many remain intact: The rich pay to be maimed in the name of pleasure. The poor simply rot away. Timothy's pained leg, a seaman's missing arm, a young boy's black teeth, a prostitute's boils ÷ all serve to emphasize how inescapable the human body can be. London's cold permeates all.

Timothy is compelled to investigate what appears to be a series of murders involving young girls, their bodies branded with a mysterious letter "G." His investigations lead him deep into the city's evil recesses where immorality is protected by wealth and power.

In keeping with the plot of "A Christmas Carol," Timothy also sees ghosts, most often those of his father.

Bayard flirts with (and gracefully avoids) disaster by attempting to weave all of these elements of story together. Turning one of literature's most pathetically precious characters into a world-wearied young man takes balls ÷ big skillful balls.

Bayard uses his big skillful balls wisely. He doesn't attempt to emulate the Dickensian prose style, which would have been unendingly annoying. Instead, Bayard only employs Timothy's famous beginnings as a springboard for a tale about the imperfection and beauty of life. The book addresses the romanticized way in which the Dickens story ends, stressing just how romanticized it actually was.

Bayard's book manages to spotlight the beauty of the human spirit by juxtaposing it with the worst humanity has to offer. Without being cheesy or obvious, "Mr. Timothy" is heartening, and filled with enough adventure and intrigue to distract the reader's attention from the book's subtler messages.