What Book to Read?

I think Michael Chabon is a wonderful writer – you can read my review of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay here. The Final Solution, subtitled A Story of Detection, is a much slighter work, perhaps best described as a novella; indeed it won the 2004 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, which is a prize awarded for short stories. But it still shows what a great writer Chabon is.

The story, which is set in 1944, begins when an old man, who some of the locals dimly remember as once being a famous detective, meets a German boy with a parrot on the South Downs. The boy seems to be mute, but the parrot certainly is not; he reels off strings of German numbers. The old man is intrigued (even before he hears the numbers): ‘For the first time in many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world’s beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.’ But others are also interested in the parrot. Then there is a murder, and the parrot disappears. The old man agrees to help the police – not to catch the murderer, but to find the parrot.

The old man is never named, but he is of course Sherlock Holmes, who retired after his illustrious career to the South Downs to keep bees; you can read about it here. In this story, the bees are still going strong. And there are a number of shady characters and odd circumstances for the old man to investigate. After a while, despite his physical frailty, he begins to enjoy himself: ‘A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, catching the light in glints and surmises. It was the deepest pleasure life could afford, this deductive crystallization, this paroxysm of guesswork, and one he had lived without for a terribly long time.’ So he follows the clues through to the end. But there is still a mystery unsolved. ‘The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings’. But now, faced with the unresolved, he concludes ‘That it was the insoluble problems – the false leads and the cold cases – that reflected the true nature of things.’ There is no ‘final solution’.

I really enjoy the way Chabon writes. His tone is wry and gently humorous; he seems able to like all his characters – even the dodgy ones, and of course the parrot. The old man is described as having a ‘liveliness in his gaze, a kind of cool vitality that was nearly amusement’, and this description could apply equally well to Chabon’s writing. For example, here is the ‘liveliness’ and ‘nearly amusement’. Mr Sackett, who has the title of managing director of a Research Dairy, is sitting in on an interview. ‘But he lit his cigarette like a soldier, hastily, and listened with an air of one accustomed to seeking flaws in strategies. It was doubtful, thought the old man, he had ever been near an actual cow.’ Here also, the fabled powers of observation of Sherlock Holmes.

The book both pays homage to and gently mocks Sherlock Holmes, and the early twentieth century detective story. In the final Holmes story, His Last Bow (1917) he comes out of retirement to hunt a German spy; there are shades, somewhat modified, of that story in this one. I wondered if I also saw references to John Buchan through allusions to Mr Black (the Black Stone in Thirty Nine Steps) and Der Vogel (to the wild birds and caged birds in Mr Standfast), but that could be imagination. The old man’s final conclusion about the true nature of things is, however, clearly at odds with the certainties of the older form.

If you enjoy this minor venture into detective fiction by Chabon, you might also enjoy his more fully realised novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), a complex murder mystery, among other things, set in an alternative present, where European Jews have been settled in Alaska (as was actually proposed) rather than in Israel. I will post about this novel soon.

In the meantime, you can read more about Michael Chabon here.