So I just finished reading The Hound of the Baskervilles which is of course a book starring (for the most part) Sherlock Holmes. A persistently brilliant read and the reason I choose the former adjective is due to the positively canine behavioural traits of the star of the show, one Mr Sherlock Holmes.
The introduction to The Hound... by art and film buff and general broadcasting guru Christopher Frayling makes clear that Holmes is a singular man in the romantic and 'existential' sense if you'll permit me (I intend to stay clear of terms such as 'epistemology' throughout here as frankly they're a turn-off) beginning with that astonishing opening in which a curly haired spaniel materializes from Holmes's deductive reasoning of a walking stick with distinctive marks in the middle (n.b Holmes reasons through intuition that the dog carried the stick by the teeth - one thing I did really enjoy about this incidentally was the unspoken detail that the marks in the middle indicated equal weighting on each side should the stick be carried horizontally, which is of course exactly how a dog would behave. James Wood talks about stuff like this in How Fiction Works - seems to me to be fiendishly hard to do but I digress) which the trusty (yes it's a dog metaphor) Dr Watson brings to his master's attention (yada yada).
Hound of the Baskervilles has been variously touted as an attack of the Id on the ego (step up Freudians), an attack of the proletariat on the bourgeoisie (step up Marxists), a treatise on rationalism (step up philosophers) and as a detective story (the other 90%). For me leaving aside the underlying metaphorical stuff this book is just a consistently amazing example of how to write really great detective fiction. I've read quite a lot of this stuff in my youth and I've travelled the globe in my narrative escapades - I've read Mankell and some of Larsson in Sweden, Chandler in LA, Christie in most of England and Europe and Le Carre in Berlin and London. I'm a cultured guy when it comes to this genre. But Kurt Wallander will never be played by Lucy Liu. What makes a detective and his compatriot so popular they can be watched by millions a century after they retired?
Lots of people (alright, everyone) will say 'it's the story, dummy' and it is. BUT it isn't just that is it? Arch clever guy Umberto Eco studied a great deal of Conan Doyle's - and by extension Holmes's - superlative techniques and dextrously weaved them into The Name of the Rose. The novel is set in a Franciscan monastery in which an 'outsider' (read; non-superstitious weirdo) comes in and begins to use his environment, temporality, cause and effect and intuition into behaviours by those around him to build a picture of the murderer, who he eventually gets (although not without the bodies piling up). Eco's point is that the deductive qualities of Holmes are in fact vastly heightened qualities that we ourselves have and use to make sense of the world around us on a regular basis.
Detective stories come in many hues but Holmes and his wit seem somehow life-affirming; unlike the miserablist Larsson who, being brutally frank, comes across as a bit too nihilistic to be taken very seriously (there's only one way to do nihilism: with a smile). Conan Doyle makes the facts of the case stand up and tell their story and that's the engaging part; the interaction, the mingling of these pieces of evidence which are alive and say things to each other - not to mention the ingeniously innocuous nature of some of them (the boot that goes missing from outside Henry Baskerville's hotel room upon his arrival in London is one of the best 'elements' of a story I've read and is weaved in such simple colours) all of which suggest both nothing and something deeply odd all at once.
The Hound is also particularly famous for its depiction of Dartmoor. With its huddle of stone dwellings once occupied by prehistoric man and wails of legendary beasts swirling in the fog, the clarity and steadfast logic of a clearly thrilled Holmes stands in stark contrast to a beautifully realised canvas, almost impressionist in its ethereal wastelands and inhospitable mires. The inferences of man versus his environment and specifically the science of reason against the unspoken laws of superstition and whimsy are drawn with subtlety and simplicity at every stroke; at just 160 pages long the pervasively sinister atmosphere is sketched expertly and creeps in every page the lonesome Watson spends there with his charge. Conan Doyle spent time there with former journalist and Express editor Fletcher Robinson and as a serving doctor in the Boer War it's obvious the guy's got previous with desolate open environments. The seal of approval may well come from the poet T.S. Eliot, who was fairly familiar with the composition of the dearth of humanity himself and was reportedly a huge fan of Holmes's.
The above may be another strong reason for the enduring popularity of this, Holmes's best-loved and most-read tale. Garlanded with praise like no other work by Conan Doyle, it's hard not to notice the familiar theme of man overcoming uncertainty - and almost certain death by what can be variously interpreted as hereditary traits and the sins of others through to sheer fear and ignorance of death and its consequences to master all within his realm by relying on his own wherewithal and intellectual ability.
I could go on and on about this book - it's that good and delivers with so much economy of prose on such a consistently high plateau that this 'review' or whatever is something of a knockabout thing in assessing its merits and powers, but the greatest praise I guess I could pay The Hound is that I will seriously consider seeing how Lucy Liu gets on if she travels to Dartmoor.
No comments:
Post a Comment