Book Review

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The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon

This is not a Holocaust story, per se [but see below], but a Sherlock Holmes story [I seem to be reading a few of these pastiche/hommage stories latterly: is this synchronicity? Or is it just fantasy?]; except that it isn’t: nowhere in the narrative is this revered name mentioned, although the narrative is structured in such a way that no alternative can be considered. There has to be a reason for this, although Chabon, whilst not specifically evasive, is somewhat elliptical in his explanation, in the “About the Book” end section, which is the transcription of an interview with Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, in December 2004, following this book’s publication. He says “The first writer that [ouch!] I really fell in love with was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and in particular his Sherlock Holmes stories, and the first story that I ever wrote was a Sherlock Holmes story. It was a kind of pastiche. … It was called ‘The Revenge of Captain Nemo’.”

Asked if he went back & reread that story to prepare him for this latest book, he says: “No, I didn’t.” Other than that, the only reasoning which throws any light on his decision to leave the protagonist unnamed is a desire to direct more credit to the original author: “I found it was all just still so vivid to me, and I think that’s a testimony to what a truly fine writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is, and I don’t think he is really given enough credit for the quality of his writing. … [Inskeep: Do you hope that there might be people who will pick up this Sherlock Holmes story, this mystery that you’ve written, who might not otherwise have read some of your work?”] You know what I would really hope would be that a lot of people who might be inclined to pick up this book and read it because it’s one of my books, might then think, ‘Hey, maybe there’s more to this Arthur Conan Doyle than I thought there was’, and go back and pick up some of those fantastic stories.” So: still no categorical admission — I’ll keep my observations to myself, but I find this somewhat uncomfortable.

As I also do with the book’s title, notwithstanding the subtitle: A Story of Detection. Chabon is quite open about his Jewish heritage; in 2005, his latest novel, entitled The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, was set in Alaska, in Chabon’s imagined alternative Jewish homeland. That said, I am ambivalent about the title of the book under review; it feels uncomfortable to borrow the notorious title of a ghastly genocidal scheme for a novel, despite the association, in a different context, with the story’s main character being appropriate [although, *Spoiler Alert!* — given that he survives to potentially continue detecting at the end, it might not be his final solution to a mystery?], and that the other main character, a nine-year old boy called Linus Steinman, is evidently an escapee from the Holocaust, by virtue of having been allowed to leave Germany during that awful period; but, on the other hand, it could be argued that Chabon has more right to claim ownership of the reference than someone not of his heritage, so perhaps I’m just being pernickety.

The boy is lodging with a family consisting of a high-church Anglican vicar, the Reverend Panicker, who is “a Malayalee [sic] from Kerala, black as a boot-heel”, his wife, “a large, plain, flaxen-haired Oxfordshirewoman [sic]”, their son Reggie, and several other lodgers. The boy is mute, possibly the result of some past trauma, but he also has an African Grey parrot, who speaks mainly, but not exclusively, German which consists predominantly of strings of seven single-digit numbers; although it also is given to singing, and “reciting bits and scraps of poems of Goethe and Schiller known to every German schoolchild over the age of seven.” The boy had already encountered the retired detective, when the latter was concerned enough to tear his thoughts away from his beloved bees to persuade the former to remove himself from the electrified railway line at the back of the detective’s house, along which he was walking.

When one of the Panickers’ lodgers is murdered, and the parrot disappears, the detective, despite currently having no appetite for the vicissitudes of his former calling, is persuaded to investigate; there is, of course, a local police Inspector, the grandson of an Inspector of the detective’s former acquaintance, Sandy Bellows, who, along with his lumpen colleague, DC Quint, defers to the great former detective in this curious case. The case is solved successfully, inevitably, but I did feel that Chabon was trying too hard to emulate the contemporary style in which Conan Doyle wrote, making it feel, for me anyway, unnecessarily verbose. That said, it is a short novel; perhaps more accurately a novella, at 120 pages in length, including some quite good full-plate monochrome pencil drawings; so it is not an onerous undertaking to read it, and the conclusion is neat, as should be expected. The paperback edition I read was published in 2008 by Harper Perennial, London, ISBN 978-0-00-719603-6.