Sherlock

Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print in 1887, and entered the public domain some time in the 20th century.  Long before he did so, however, he entered the public consciousness.  There are many more people who know who Holmes is, and can identify his defining qualities and tropes--his keen intelligence, his ability to deduce the most intimate details about a person from a brief observation of their appearance and behavior, his friendship with Doctor Watson--than have ever read a single one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories or novels, or even seen them adapted.  One of the most interesting recent indications of the depth to which Holmes has permeated Western culture is the fact that Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss's Sherlock, which concluded its three-episode 'season' this week, doesn't simply borrow Holmesian tropes from Conan Doyle's originals, but from intervening adaptations.  The jangling score seems to have been lifted from Guy Ritchie's 2009 film.  Holmes's reconfiguration as a sociopath with substance abuse problems, who pursues cases solely for the joy of stimulating his intellect and without a thought for the lives that are often at stake, is ground that has been well trodden by House.  And though Moffat, at least, writes Holmes in a manner so similar to his take on the Doctor that there were moments in his episode, "A Study in Pink," that I could have sworn the character was being played by Matt Smith instead of Dominic Cumberbatch, Cumberbatch himself sometimes seems to be channeling Jeremy Brett, particularly in the way he uses his voice.

Of course, with the possible exception of the music, it is probably premature to identify any influence on the show's tone or direction, because at present there isn't really a show.  The season, comprising three 90 minute stories, is probably best thought of as a proof of concept for the idea of Holmes transposed to the 21st century.  Or rather, as an attempt at such a proof that isn't entirely persuasive, but rather demonstrates that the though the idea has potential, its pitfalls are numerous and not easily avoided.  Of the three episodes, "A Study in Pink" is superb, a witty, effortlessly involving story with an irresistible hook--how can a killer force his victims to commit suicide--that also doubles as compelling introduction to the reinvented Holmes and Watson, and to the beginning of their partnership.  Steve Thompson's followup, however, "The Blind Banker," is terrible, and Mark Gatiss's "The Great Game" is good, but achieves that goodness only by stuffing its running time to the brim with puzzles, close shaves, explosions and near-explosions, and the introduction of a new Moriarty who doesn't quite light up the screen as the new Holmes and Watson do.  It achieves through brute force what "A Study in Pink" managed with a much lighter, more elegant approach. 

More importantly, the three stories don't create a sense of belonging to a single series.  They vary in tone and in their treatment of their characters.  Holmes is a Doctor-ish blur of super-excited intelligence in "A Study in Pink," but more subdued in the other two.  Watson is stiff but stalwart in "Study," a bumbling pushover in "Banker," and an audience surrogate, whose normalcy sheds a light on Holmes's cold detachment, in "Game."  The two meet for the first time in "Study" and spend the episode forming a tentative bond, but the two following episodes take their partnership for granted rather than building it up.  "Study" introduces Holmes's drug addiction and strongly hints that his personal growth will be the series's overarching theme, but this is abandoned in "Banker" and "Game."  There is, in short, no sense that a single vision is driving this reinvention of the character.  The three stories feel disconnected from one another, as though Thompson and Gatiss were writing fanfic in Moffat's world, and failing to get the feel of it quite right.  (Of course, given how brief the season has been, it might be equally possible to say that Thompson or Gatiss have the true measure of the show and that Moffat is the fanfic writer, but as I like his story best, I'm inclined to think that it's his vision that should prevail.)

The problem, I think, is the running time.  90 minutes is an unforgiving timeslot for a writer who can't plot or keep their plot moving--which is, quite frankly, most television writers.  Moffat manages the task with ease and Gatiss barrels through it, while Thompson produces a stultifying hour and a half.  But because each of them is aware of how easily a less than engaging mystery might lose the audience, they put most of their eggs in the plot basket--the longer running time demands it.  So that the variations in the way Holmes and Watson are presented in the three episodes are compounded by the latter two's willingness to put the two characters, and the relationship between them, on the back-burner in favor of moving the plot along.  A one-hour episode, meanwhile, can afford to be a little slack on the story front, and to develop its characters instead.  Another way of putting it, of course, is that Sherlock is keeping faith with Conan Doyle himself, who famously did little to develop either Holmes, Watson, or their friendship.  Like Moffat and Gatiss's versions, they have a brief introduction, agree to live together, and set off on their adventures.  From that moment onwards, the status quo--Holmes's feats of deduction, his uncontainable personality, and Watson's total devotion to him--is established and only rarely deviated from.  I liked the idea of a more traditional type of television series centered on Holmes, which Moffat's episode seemed to promise, and my mixed feelings about Sherlock are mainly rooted in the fact that it doesn't seem interested in becoming that series.  But there is also the simple fact that the status quo established by Moffat and Gatiss isn't as compelling or as well-crafted as Conan Doyle's.  None of the three writers can consistently deliver Holmes-ian deduction, and their take on Holmes itself is not only, as Dan Hartland (who has written more effusive praise about all three episodes) says, a less rounded character than Conan Doyle's Holmes, who was principled and compassionate on top of being brilliant and cold (to which I would add that it also smacks disappointingly of the all-too typical tendency to vilify intellect and those who possess it), but also a lesser version of a character that's been done definitively.  House is by no means great television, but it has surely plumbed the depths of what it means to always be the smartest guy in the room, to always know that people are lying and keeping secrets, and to more easily find pleasure in intellectual pursuits than in the company of others.  It's pretty clear that neither Sherlock nor Cumberbatch--who may have a performance of Hugh Laurie's caliber in him but is not being given the chance to demonstrate this--are interested in delving that deep, so I'm not sure what the point of this watered down version of the character arc is.

All of this is not to say that there aren't things I like about Sherlock.  I think Martin Freeman's Watson is very good; I think the combination of humor and horror is very effective; I really like the way the writers use on-screen titles (will it ever make sense to show the screen of a cell phone again?).  But again, these are all things that worked very well in "A Study in Pink" and were either abandoned or handled less effectively in the following episodes.  The one thing that Sherlock does well and consistently is its recreation of Victorian London in the 21st century, which is nothing short of masterful.  The music plays a part in this, of course, and so do directors Paul McGuinan and Euros Lyn, who ensure that interiors are always close and overstuffed and exteriors always dark and foggy (I suspect that we will never see an episode of Sherlock set in summer or spring), and who carefully point their cameras away from billboards, neon lights, logos and trademarks, showing only the bricks and cobblestones that are still there underneath it all.  But it's the writing that truly transposes Victorian Holmes onto the 21st century, so perfectly that you'd swear the character had been written for our era.  It's darkly funny that Watson can just as easily have sustained a war injury in Afghanistan in 2010 as in 1887.  Blogs and text messages map perfectly onto popular magazines and telegrams, and anonymous commenting is as good a way to keep in touch with a mysterious contact as cryptic messages in the personals page.  Cabs are, of course, as necessary a means of transportation in today's London as they were 123 years ago.  The writers' eagerness to play around with Conan Doyle's original material contributes to the series's sense of Holmes-ishness, whether it's Moffat's clever inversion of the dying message in "A Study in Scarlet," or Gatiss's more straightforward incorporation of "The Bruce Partington Plans" as a sub-plot of "The Great Game."  In a way, Sherlock is as much, if not more, a work of steampunk as Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes--it overlays a Victorian sensibility over modern technology, and creates an unreal world that is all its own.  If I'm enchanted with the series despite its many flaws, it is mainly because of the overpowering sense of that world that it creates, which often overwhelms those flaws.

There is, of course, a dark underside to Sherlock's fascination with Victoriana, and it is very much on display in "The Blind Banker," which on top of being a slack, overwrought mystery is suffused with so many Asian stereotypes straight out of a pulp novel (or out of Conan Doyle's more objectionable Holmes stories) that it has to be seen to be believed: sinister Chinese triads masquerading as circus performers, chasing down a vulnerable and doomed young woman just trying to escape her past, and torturing our heroes with deadly chinoiserie (as if this were not enough, the episode kicks off with a non-sequitor of a scene in which Holmes is attacked by a robed swordsman straight out of a 19th century penny dreadful).  It's tempting to read the episode as a ham-fisted attempt to comment on Victorian Orientalism that ends up participating in it instead, but Sherlock has been so very bad with other issues of representation that one can't help but assume that the fault is in the intent rather than the execution.  SelenaK has a nice summary of "The Great Game"'s rather troubling treatment of homosexuality, and then there are the women: Mrs. Hudson, whose job is to be unquestioningly accommodating and, on occasion, to provide comic relief through cheerful dimness; Sally Donovan, a bitter shrew who earns the audience's ire for being mean to Holmes and has yet to demonstrate a shred of competence in her job as a police detective; Molly the pathologist, a pathetic doormat who makes obvious, doomed passes at Holmes, and whom he casually humiliates on a regular basis; and Sarah, Watson's love interest who clearly has no existence beyond that role, because her response to a first date that ends with her being kidnapped, tied up, and nearly killed is to agree to a second one.  Just about the only positive thing that can be said about Sherlock's depiction of women is that it doesn't happen very often, unless they are the victims of a crime.

I've written a lot here about the things that frustrate or anger me about Sherlock, so it may sound strange if I say that I actually like the show a lot and look forward to the next batch of episodes.  The thing is, the problems with the show are the things about it that stick out--the inconsistency between chapters, the laziness of borrowing Holmes's characterization from another television series, the often shoddy plotting, the ghastly writing for women--whereas what works, what I found enjoyable and even lovable, is more in the realm of ambiance--the worldbuilding I've already written about, but also the chemistry between Freeman and Cumberbatch, and more than either of these the sense that this really is Holmes, not quite Conan Doyle's Holmes but Holmes nonetheless, brought to the 21st century.  That's certainly enough to bring me back, even though I suspect that the series will never deliver the character development that "A Study in Pink" seemed to promise, and that its female characters will never improve.  What I'd like, however, if the Sherlock that I wanted can never be, is a little more care in the construction of the episodic, Conan Doyle-esque Sherlock that Moffat and Gatiss seem interested in.  Let's have a lot more "Study in Pink"s, and a lot fewer "Blind Banker"s.

Three Links Make a Post

Some of my recent online reading.

• Hal Duncan writes about Battlestar Galactica, and, as on most topics, does so intelligently, forcefully, and at great length.  Lots of interesting ideas here: some more exploration of what it means that the show's premise maps more accurately to the Holocaust than to 9/11 (I hadn't, for example, thought of Gaeta as embodying the cliché of the victim made monstrous by his victimhood, mainly because I was too busy being aggravated by the fact that the show's one and only acknowledged homosexual character was being depicted as a villain who kept seeking out powerful, charismatic men to follow), some provocative meditations on just how telling it is that its writers have favored the 9/11 parallel, and mainly a lot of insights into the kind of story the writers produced as opposed to the one they thought they were telling.


• Dan Hartland is rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories in order of publication.  I read these stories, and the Holmes novels, in junior high, and for years I assumed that this was a rite of passage for people growing up in Western countries.  Again and again, however, I've met people who knew Holmes as a character and cultural icon but had never read a single one of Conan Doyle's works, and eventually I realized that they were the vast majority.  Dan's series is a great opportunity to disentangle the iconic image of Holmes we all (including those of us who read the stories and novels) suck down from the aether from the actual fiction in which he appeared, and reevaluate them as works of fiction (thus far, to no great acclaim).


• Richard Morgan writes about The Lord of the Rings, and argues that the only emotionally honest moment in the whole gargantuan work comes during a conversation between two orcs.  I'm beginning to wonder if there's a clause written into the contract of every author who sells a potentially paradigm-shifting work of epic fantasy obliging them to publicly excoriate Tolkien, because it happens quite often.  Moorcock did it.  China Miéville did it (sadly, the essay is no longer online.  There's an excerpt here, but all you really need to know is that he calls Tolkien "a wen on the arse of fantasy literature").  Now it's Morgan's turn.  What always gets to me about these essays is their blistering certainty that they're saying something new as opposed to something that the community of fantasy readers has been debating for decades (OK, "Epic Pooh" was first published in 1978, but I find it hard to believe that Moorcock was the first person to express those specific reservations more than a decade after The Lord of the Rings' popularity exploded).
  
  Most fantasy readers go through a phase where they realize that The Lord of the Rings is conservative, reactionary and, by certain very real yardsticks such as, to take Morgan's example, realistic characterization, not very good.  It's like figuring out that Narnia is a Christian allegory.  You take a deep breath, pick your jaw up from the floor, and decide if you can go on liking the book in spite of these flaws--because it has other qualities that you value, and because a genuinely good work of fiction is one that you can enjoy even if you disagree with the attitudes it expresses.  I really don't know who it is that Morgan and the other writers like him think is going to be blown away by their regurgitated criticisms, and I have an unpleasant suspicion that essays like this one are actually written for people who have already decided that they don't like Tolkien, and are looking for ammunition to lob at his fans.

Recent Reading Roundup 8

1. Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers - I don't imagine that I'm the first reader to pick up the next-to-last novel in Sayers's Peter Wimsey detective series, Gaudy Night, and then move backwards through her bibliography to the origin of Wimsey's relationship with Gaudy protagonist Harriet Vane. As was the case with Gaudy, I found Strong Poison compulsively readable and a great deal of fun. It was also, in spite of the rather grim plot, which sees Harriet accused of murdering her former fiancé and facing the gallows, surprisingly funny, although Sayers does on occasion stray too far into farce, and on other occasions (especially when delving under the surface of Wimsey's over-the-top persona) into melodrama. In her first appearance, Harriet is only very faintly sketched, and a little too perfect to be believed--I certainly see how Sayers fans might jokingly (and sometimes not so jokingly) accuse her of having written Vane as a self-insertion character. Her interactions with Wimsey are obviously intended primarily to shed light on his character, and not always an entirely favorable light--the characters' first meeting, in which Wimsey just comes out and announces that he and Harriet will be married, has got to be one of the most pitiful moments in literary history. I had a very strong impulse to step into the book and stomp on his foot before he made an even greater fool of himself than he already had. The mystery itself was rather obvious, but I wasn't really reading for the mystery so that wasn't too big a problem (I did, however, find Strong Poison's final third, in which the narrative leaves both Wimsey and Vane and follows a tertiary character who I didn't really care about, a bit dull). I think I probably will end up reading the other Wimsey/Vane novels, but I don't imagine I'll be traveling any further back into Sayers's bibliography.


2. A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin - Cullin's novel was published at roughly the same time as Michael Chabon's The Final Solution, and tells roughly the same story: in the 1940s, an ancient Sherlock Holmes struggles against age and his failing mind, and is confronted by the ultimate insolubility of life, as exemplified by one of the atrocities of the early 20th century (the Holocaust in Chabon's case, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in Cullin's). At the time of the two works' publication, I remember that most comparisons were more favorable towards Cullin's, calling it a more subtle and thoughtful accomplishment. In one respect, I do believe Cullin outdoes Chabon--whereas the latter author's protagonist is Sherlock Holmes the character, ravaged by age but still unmistakably Arthur Conan Doyle's creation (in spite of Chabon's rather silly insistence on referring to him only as 'the old man'), Cullin chooses to separate Holmes the character (whose ticks and mannerisms, we are told, were in many cases the result of aggrandizement and outright invention on the part of one John Watson) from Holmes the man, who is human, fallible, and in many ways quite ordinary, and who is alternately bemused and exasperated at being constantly compared to and confused with a literary creation.
   
   In most other respects, however, Chabon's novella turns out to be a more satisfying read. Trick switches back and forth between Holmes' present, in which he is faced with a mundane tragedy, his recent trip to Japan, and a baffling case from the very end of his detective career. It seems unfair to complain that none of these plot strands is very interesting or exciting--Cullin is very obviously not writing a mystery--but they all seem to amount to the same thing, the same point retold three times, which we will have already gathered from Chabon's shorter (although not by much) and more beautifully written novella - that not even the Great Detective can make sense of life. Trick is undoubtedly the more subtle and subdued of the two works, but it is too subdued for my tastes, too steeped in melancholy. It would probably be accurate to say that The Final Solution works a little too hard to milk the tragedy of its central mystery, and that it often teeters over the edge of melodrama, but at the very least it tries to tug at its readers' heartstrings. Cullin's novel, in comparison, is too prudish to make the attempt--it seems to feel that eliciting strong emotion would be in bad taste.


3. Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim - It's been almost two weeks since I finished Heim's 1995 debut, and I still can't decide whether I liked it, disliked it, or thought it was just OK. The novel switches back and forth between the points of view of two boys who, at the age of eight, were molested by their baseball coach, as well as those of their friends and relatives. One of the boys, Brian, has completely blocked out the experience, and in his late teens begins to suspect that the hours missing from his life and the obvious symptoms of trauma he experienced in their wake are signs of an alien abduction. The other, Neil, is gay and has convinced himself that what he experienced was an act of love. This is not the kind of novel I tend to read very often, but even I noticed Heim resorting to stock situations (Neil engages in risky sexual behavior and ends up in danger) and characters (Brian's oblivious father; Neil's promiscuous mother). Heim isn't the greatest writer ever--some of his dialogue and narration are, in fact, painfully artificial--but what elevates Mysterious Skin and makes it so very compelling is that his writing has an unbelievably visceral quality. Whether describing a Kansas fishing pond or the most graphic sex scenes, he puts you in the room, and although neither boy is particularly likable--Brian is a bit of a nebbish and Neil simply isn't a very good person--they are believable as human beings and ultimately pitiable. I can't quite decide, however, whether these strengths are enough to justify the novel's existence, or whether it is ultimately nothing more than very standard variation on a very standard topic.


4. The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell - In 1857, the East India Company's decades-long hold over India was shattered (and quickly replaced by outright colonial rule) by a revolt of native battalions. British settlements in India were were massacred or besieged (the phrase 'the black hole of Calcutta' originated in an account by one of the survivors of these sieges). J.G. Farrell's 1973 novel describes the months-long besiegement of a fictional Company outpost (drawing primarily on the real-life siege of Lucknow). According to the novel's introduction, Farrell is parodying a stock plot that became prevalent in the years following the 1857 mutiny--the siege novel. Without having read a single iteration of this concept, I think most of us can imagine its more prominent elements (quite a few of which frequently turn up in your average disaster movie)--the guy, the girl, the priest, the star-crossed romances, the weakling transformed into an action hero. For a novel with such a grim topic--two of them, in fact: the inhuman conditions and brutal suffering within the besieged Residency and the very notion of colonial rule--Siege is surprisingly lighthearted, sometimes verging on farcical, but therein lies the secret of its success. Farrell attempts, and for the most part sustains, a delicate balance between horror and farce, humor and seriousness. The defenders squabble over trifles and cling to pointless social niceties, which makes them, at one and the same time, both ridiculous and noble, and therefore entirely human.
   
   Where Siege nearly falters is in its political dimension. Farrell works hard to ensure that the novel, whose characters earnestly and fervently believe in the idea of a moral empire, spreading science, progress and enlightenment to the unwashed native masses, doesn't devolve into a screed against something that, we can all agree, was a truly terrible idea and anyway doesn't exist anymore. He tries to distract us from the more obvious aspect of the discussion by widening it--instead of asking whether colonialism was a good idea, a question to which we all know the answer, he asks which is more important, ideas (as represented by the aforementioned science and progress) or feelings (as represented, I think, by the bruised and battered ego of a nation condescended to and ordered about for decades). The two questions, unfortunately, don't map very well onto each other, and anyway the latter is a little too metaphysical for my taste (and shouldn't the answer, in any case, be 'both?'). It's hard not to roll one's eyes when Siege's plot or character exploration give way to yet another discussion of these two warring aspects of human nature, but happily Farrell more than compensates for those dull stretches--with some scenes that are uproariously funny, and others that are pulse-poundingly intense. Ultimately, for all that they are ridiculous and hold objectionable opinions, Farrell makes us care about the starving and ill defenders, and hope against hope that, like the protagonists of a siege novel, they too will have a happy ending.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes' Arthur & George is a novel that sent me scurrying to the thesaurus, searching for just the right adjective to describe it. 'Accomplished' might be a good word--without resorting to flowery and interminable description, Arthur & George is an impressive and convincing recreation of its era. 'Precise' might be another--every word in its place, and each one doing exactly what Barnes intended it to do, no more and no less. And then there are all the adjectives I can't use to describe the book--words like 'grand', 'exciting', 'passionate'. Arthur & George, in other words, is the sort of book I could easily see placing on the shortlist for a major award, in recognition of everything it does right. And just as easily, I can see how it would be the first book to get knocked off the list when the time came to choose the winner, because of all of the things it doesn't try to do at all.

Barnes' novel is a fictionalization of an episode in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1906, Doyle was petitioned by a George Edalji, a Staffordshire lawyer, who had been convicted of mutilating a horse and sending threatening letters to himself. Although the evidence against Edalji was slight, and there was every indication that the local police had settled on him as a suspect because of his non-white lineage (Edalji's father, the Reverend Shapurji Edalji, was converted to Christianity in his youth, married a Scottish woman, and at the time of the trial had served his congregation for several decades), and although the mutilations continued while Edalji was remanded and awaiting trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison. A letter-writing campaign resulted in his release after three years, but with no explanation. With a criminal conviction on his record, Edalji couldn't practice law, and he turned to Doyle for help in obtaining a pardon and compensation from the Home Office (although significantly altered, the Edalji case was obviously an inspiration for a sub-plot in Michael Chabon's novella The Final Solution).

The book's title, and even its cover design, which depicts two men standing together in silent camaraderie, suggests that Barnes' focus is the relationship between Arthur and George. In truth, the two don't even meet until more than halfway through the novel, and spend very little time together after that initial meeting. George never plays Watson to Arthur's Holmes (and frankly, if there's a Holmes between the two it is the dispassionate, observant George), and the interactions between them are never more than polite. Barnes is far more concerned with describing the two men as individuals--George, brought up in quiet asceticism, an unimaginative and asocial man; Arthur, driven by notions of honor and chivalry, given to grand gestures and elaborate demonstrations of affection.

Barnes' prose throughout the novel, although by no means unlovely or underperforming--as I've already said, the novel effortlessly evokes its period--is dry and utilitarian. His purpose is to describe locations, characters and events, but at no point do his descriptions elicit emotion. Instead of forcing his readers to feel as he wants them to feel, Barnes politely invites them to sympathize, not empathize, with his characters. Even his descriptions of high emotion have a clinical, detached quality.

And then his capacity for calm professional analysis ran out. He felt immensely tired and yet also over-excited. His sequential thoughts lost their steady pace; they lurched, they plunged ahead, they followed emotional gravity. It was suddenly borne in upon him that until minutes ago only a few people--mostly policemen, and perhaps some foolishly ignorant members of the public, the sort who would beat on the doors of a passing cab--had actually assumed him guilty. But now--and shame broke over him at the realization--now almost everyone would think him so.

The emotion that Arthur & George does elicit is borrowed from its readers, and from history itself. Barnes is relying on us to react with outrage and horror at the indignities that George Edalji and his family experience. For years, the family received abusive letters and threatening messages (the same letters which George was accused and convicted of writing). Barnes describes this harassment in chilly, matter-of-fact terms, and leaves it to us to imagine the stifling horror of this relentless assault. Similarly, there is very little editorializing in his descriptions of George's patently unjustified and unfair trial and conviction--Barnes obviously assumes that we can be relied on to be horrified by this miscarriage of justice*.

This analytical, emotionless approach to character exploration invariably succeeds with George, but fails with Arthur. Arthur's problems aren't as grand and as affecting as George's. It's easy to get worked up over the thought of a blameless and decent man being convicted of a crime he didn't commit, but how exercised are we supposed to get over Arthur's marital difficulties, especially when juxtaposed with George's problems? In almost every respect, Arthur & George is a stronger novel when dealing with the latter character. When introducing his two protagonists, Barnes coyly avoids acknowledging their respective idiosyncrasies--that Arthur is the famous novelist and creator of Sherlock Holmes; that George is a middle-class Englishman of Indian descent in the 19th century (which, I suspect, means that readers who approached the novel without any prior knowledge of either the characters or the affair that brought them together had a reading experience that was quite different from mine). But the revelation that George is not white has a bite--it comes when a brutish police sergeant forces George to spell his unusual last name--whereas the discovery of Arthur's true identity smacks of playfulness: "Arthur had initially called his detective Sheridan Hope. But the name felt unsatisfactory, and in the writing Sheridan Hope had changed first into Sherringford Holmes and then--inevitably as it seemed thereafter--into Sherlock Holmes."

Most importantly, Arthur is a much less interesting character than George. There's no question which of the two would make for a more interesting dinner companion--Arthur would be able to talk about the great men of day, recount amusing stories from his past, and just in general be jovial and entertaining, whereas George's greatest contribution to the world of letters seems to have been a pamphlet about railroad law. But as a literary character, Arthur is very nearly one-note. Barnes sums him up in a few sentences--he is a man desperate to believe in chivalry and to act according to a personal code, who inevitably finds that conviction challenged by the realities of his life. Once this fairly mundane crisis is established, there is very little that the novel can tell us about Arthur that we haven't already worked out for ourselves. George, in contrast, is constantly confounding our expectations. This is due in part to Barnes stacking the deck--in the earlier segments of the novel, George's lack of appreciation for the finer nuances of social interaction is very nearly autistic ("How d'you do, my name's George" he says to the schoolyard bully, and when the above-mentioned sergeant asks for it, the sixteen year old George responds that he knows his own name). We are surprised, therefore, when we meet George as an adult and discover an observant, thoughtful individual, full of appreciation for the quirks of human behavior--even the kind he doesn't participate in himself. Once the initial surprise wears off, however, we continue to be impressed by George's ability to observe people, and to make unprejudiced and compassionate observations about them. George is also capable of turning that keen insight on himself, and of not taking himself very seriously. Ultimately, George is a thoroughly likable person, a mensch, whose quiet civility puts Arthur's blustering sentimentality to shame.

Sight, and observation, are a recurrent theme in Arthur & George, which seems only appropriate for a novel over which the ghost of the Great Detective must inevitably hover. Once again history seems to be on Barnes' side--Doyle trained as an opthamologist, and Edalji suffered from a severe myopia which, according to Doyle, was his first indication that the mild-mannered lawyer was incapable of traipsing across unfamiliar fields in the dead of night to slaughter livestock. Barnes himself seems to engage in a great deal of dispassionate observation--it is at the core of his approach to the entire novel, and primarily to the characters--and his characters attempt, with varying degrees of success, to do the same. But of greater interest to Barnes is the failure of this attempt at unprejudiced observation. Some of his characters see what they want to see--which in certain cases might be called faith, and in others self-delusion, and in others yet racism. Others refuse to see what is right in front of them, such as George's insistence that the persecution of his family and his own conviction were not motivated by racial prejudice. And then of course there are those who are obsessed with believing that which can never be seen. Doyle was famously a proponent of spiritualism, a patron of psychics and mediums, and Barnes concentrates on Arthur's relentless quest to prove--empirically, with visible evidence--that these men and women were truly contacting the world beyond.

Ultimately, however, Arthur's belief in the afterlife is not a question of evidence but of faith, and Barnes obviously expects us to consider the difference between the kind of knowledge that is supported by observation and evidence and the kind that doesn't require either. Here, unfortunately, is where history, which had previously buoyed the novel up, begins to box it in. The 19th century medium has become synonymous, in our culture, with the charlatan and the snake-oil salesman**. We can't respect Arthur's faith in the survival of the spirit because the terms in which it is couched are, to us, emblematic of self-delusion. The question is answered before it can even be asked, and the entire sub-plot--which might, I suspect, have been the point of the novel--collapses in upon itself. What's left is the historical recreation.

I read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood a few months ago, and was particularly struck by the book's first segment, which follows Herbert Clutter and his family on the last day of their lives. Capote describes the Clutters as decent, hardworking, generous people, whose lives were as charmed as it is likely that any human life could be--riddled with niggling inconveniences and not-inconsiderable sorrows, but ultimately happy and productive. I couldn't help but wonder how accurate Capote's image of the Clutters was--whether he, or their grief-struck neighbors, had smoothed over the rough edges. I had no such doubts when I read Arthur & George--I believe whole-heartedly that Barnes has captured the essence of both Doyle and Edalji's personalities, and the truth of the events that brought them together. As a recreation of a moment in history, a fictionalization of real-life events, Arthur & George is unquestionably a success. It is a nearly-journalistic account, and a very readable and fascinating one at that, but I honestly don't think that it can be called a novel.

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* The one instance in which this approach fails is in the descriptions of George's life in prison. George is a solitary, stoic individual, used to a very simple life and not given to complaining, which explains his ability to withstand his incarceration as well as he does. Ultimately, however, this resilience makes George's prison term seem less like a grave injustice and more like a dull, overlong holiday, on which he has the opportunity to read the great classic novels. It's interesting to compare Barnes' descriptions of prison life with Sarah Waters' similar recreation in her novel, Affinity. I found the novel quite tedious, but there's no question that Waters manages to bring across the horror of prison life.

** Which, if I may be allowed to segue again to Waters' Affinity, is one of the reasons I didn't care for the book--it never occurred to me that the medium character was anything but a fraud.

When Sherlock Met Vivian Relf or, Mundane Fantasy

In Michael Chabon's novella The Final Solution, Sherlock Holmes comes out of retirement in the 1940s to solve the case of a young Jewish refugee's missing parrot and, eventually, a murder. Although Holmes--his body weakened, his mind failing, and his thoughts constantly on his impending death--solves the murder, he fails to unravel the central mystery of the story--the significance of the strings of German numbers the parrot recites. A Rosebud-like secret that not even Holmes could ever hope to penetrate, it is revealed to the readers in the book's final pages.

The detective story, in the Sherlock Holmes mode, is about the triumph of rationalism. The detective strides onto a scene in which the moral order of the world has been upset and, using his wits and powers of observation, sets the world aright. It's an empowerment fantasy, too: all that is required to repair the world's ills is sufficient intellect and determination. Holmes himself is the paragon of 19th century rationalism, of an Empire the sun would never set on; the stalwart and honorable emblem of the Victorian age (with, of course, a secret opium habit and an unrequited crush on his best friend).

When confronted with the irrational horrors of the 20th century, Chabon's Holmes crumbles. What can a detective--even The Great Detective--do to right the wrongs of the Holocaust and the World Wars? What form of rational inquiry is powerful enough to make sense of them?

Despite the rather absurd comparisons to the Harry Potter series, The Final Solution was the book that came most powerfully to my mind when I read Susannah Clarke's bestselling fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell earlier this year. Both books examine the Victorian conviction that the mysteries of the world can be solved with good old-fashioned English common sense, ingenuity, and perseverance. In both books, the inherent irrationality of the world overwhelms the best efforts to comprehend it.

John Clute has described Strange & Norrell as being a story about "the unthinning of the world". Standing at the other end of the Victorian era from Chabon's Holmes, the magician Norrell announces the return of practical magic after years of merely theoretical pursuit. Deeply paranoid and greedy for fame and recognition, Norrell hoards England's magical texts and attempts to encourage a new, rationalist approach to wizardry. His magic is devoid of mystery, mysticism, and wonder.

Of course, what Norrell and his sometimes pupil and friend Strange discover is that whether you want them or not, mystery and wonder are the unavoidable side effects of working magic. They attract the attention of a fairy, who proceeds to wreak havoc under their oblivious noses. By the book's end, and despite Norrell's best efforts, England has slipped back into an era of wonder.

The meeting of the magical and mundane, the rational and irrational, has been a staple of the fantasy genre since its inception. We could add Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist--in which the middle-class merchants of Lud-in-the-Mist banish their feudal lord and his fairy friends from their town, their language and their consciousness, only to watch as their children are carried away and fairy culture seeps back into their lives--to the list of books that chart the defeat of rationalism in the face of wonder. Neil Gaiman, having a great deal more sense than publicists and journalists, pointed out that Mirrlees' book is a clear progenitor of Strange & Norrell, and in Gaiman's novels he also places modern, rational protagonists in magical, irrational settings (Richard Mayhew, kidnapped into London Below in Neverwhere; Tristran Thorn, whisked off into Faerie in Stardust; Shadow, imbroiled in the affairs of the gods in American Gods. Apparently, Charlie Nancy has a similar journey in the upcoming Anansi Boys).

Traditionally, these rational 20th century types are quickly taken over by the mystical world they've entered. Bringing a modern sensibility to fantasy, as Gaiman, for example, is often credited with doing, actually means tinging the modern with the magical and the insane. But a new generation of fantasy writers is calling that assumption into question.

In China Miéville's Bas-Lag novels, magic is a science, and although his characters frequently find themselves facing terrible danger after meddling in magical affairs, these dangers are always comprehensible. Ian R. MacLeod's over-praised novel The Light Ages works so hard at making magic mundane that the entire book becomes an exercise in dullness. In the Harry Potter books, the art of learning magic is as simple and transparent as attending classes and handing in papers, calling for no more sacrifice than that required of any other student. Rowling's magic is ordinary because her story is one of a world emerging into rationalism, rejecting its history of prejudice and lawlessness.

Miéville and MacLeod's books are usually lumped in the Steampunk sub-category of fantasy. With some reservations, we might place Rowling there too. Steampunk, of course, is all about the 19th century--the age of industry, of scientific inquiry, of the triumph of intellect over superstition. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, or Susannah Clarke's title characters, the protagonists of Steampunk novels usually have no illusions about the moral rectitude of the world they live in, but neither are they eager to return to the pastoral and the feudal. It's interesting to note this turn towards the mundane in fantasy fiction, which has occurred at a time when mainstream or semi-mainstream fiction begins to incorporate genre elements in an attempt to express the world's inherent messiness.

Which brings me back to Michael Chabon and his McSweeney's anthologies (McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales and the vastly superior McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories). Chabon's stated purpose in these anthologies is to reinvigorate the literary short story by infusing it with genre elements. To abolish, or at least strenuously ignore, genre boundaries, Chabon insists, is to make all literature stronger. I had some quibbles with this thesis, and with the success of Chabon's experiment, which I expressed when I reviewed Enchanted Chamber on Amazon (and got myself into a bit of trouble with Poppy Z. Brite too, although it all ended well). It seems that I'm not the only one who thought so, as suggested by Jonathan Lethem's intriging contribution to Enchanted Chamber, "Vivian Relf".

Vivian Relf is a young woman who keeps meeting our protagonist, Doran Close, at various points in his life. Although they both feel an overpowering sense of familiarity with each other, Vivian and Doran are strangers. Readers of genre fiction know how this story is supposed to play out: Vivian and Doran were lovers in a previous life, or they met but have had their memories of the meeting erased, or they're both aliens stranded on Earth who recognize each other on a cellular level. Lethem doesn't travel down any of these paths. Instead, he ends the story with Vivian and Doran meeting one last time, at a party given by Vivian's husband. As Doran watches in horror and despair, Vivian transforms their ethereal connection into an anecdote.

He suddenly wished to diminish it, in present company. He saw now that something precious was being taken from him in full view, a treasure he'd found in his possession only at the instant it was squandered. ... He might have known Vivian Relf better than anyone he actually knew, Doran thought now. Or anyway, he'd wanted to. It ought to mean the same thing. His soul creaked in irrelevent despair.

This is what happens, Lethem seems to be saying, when the mundane and the fantastic meet. Mix a dose of magic into your everyday life and what you'll get won't be new and exciting but curdled and sad--a slaughtered unicorn; a Monet painting reduced to grams of dry paint.

So who do you agree with, Chabon or Lethem? Is 19th century rationalism merely a fantasy, a brief interlude of reason between wonder and horror? Is the world fundamentally unknowable? Or does any mystery, too closely scrutinized, yield nothing but a disappointing secret?