The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Dr. Watson Channels His Inner Dickens The conceit of Anthony Horowitz' The House of Silk (2011) is that twenty-five years after Dr. John Watson helped Sherlock Holmes solve two inter-tangled cases, Watson is writing his account of the adventure because it was too shocking to publish in 1890, involving "A conspiracy that . . . encompassed murder, torture, kidnapping, and the perversion of justice." Now because Holmes has recently died and Watson is missing him (longing to join him), he's decided to write about the adventure, despite it still being so sensational and sensitive that he'll have the manuscript secreted away until 100 years have passed--so it feels like a recently discovered Holmes work by "Watson." The story begins with Holmes astounding Watson with his powers of ratiocination, observation, and deduction by saying without any preamble: "Influenza is unpleasant. . . but you are right in thinking that, with your wife's help, the child will recover soon." No sooner has Holmes explained the "elementary" way in which he "knew" what's been going on in Watson's life than a long-haired Wimbledon art dealer named Edmund Carstairs pays a call. He tells a dramatic story set in America and involving a Boston Brahmin, four landscapes by John Constable, an anachronistic train robbery, and a shoot out between a gang of Irish immigrant hoodlums and a posse of Pinkerton's agents. Carstairs is convinced that one of the surviving Irish gangsters has tracked him down for revenge. After the gangster apparently robs Carstairs' home and good old persevering but not wholly intelligent Inspector Lestrade gets involved, Holmes summons the Baker Street Irregulars and--"The game's afoot!" Horowitz clearly enjoys channeling Conan Doyle (and Watson) as he moves the story forward, introducing the mysterious and ominous House of Silk, riffing on familiar Holmes-isms (e.g., "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"), and having Watson allude to former "real" cases (e.g., The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Greek Interpreter, The Red-Haired League, etc.) and indulge in suspenseful foreshadowing (e.g., "He had entered a veritable miasma of evil, and harm, in the worst possible way, was to come to us all too soon"). One of the most enjoyable parts of the novel is the deep and abiding friendship between Holmes and Watson. Watson reveals how much Holmes liked him ("Dear old Watson. How good it is to have you at my side") and how much he liked Holmes ("I have to say that I took immense satisfaction in these moments of quiet sociability and felt myself to be one of the luckiest men in London to have shared in the conversation which I have just described and to be walking in such a leisurely manner at the side of so great a personage as Sherlock Holmes"). He expresses their relationship as affectionate and complementary: "Now that I come to think of it, I was as assiduous in my duties as his biographer as he was in the pursuit of his various investigations. Perhaps that was why the two of us got on so well." Horowitz writes vivid, witty descriptions, like "Lestrade had the sunken eyes and the general demenour of a rat who has been obliged to dress up for lunch at the Savoy," and "What a place of broken promises and lost hopes the pawn broker proved to be. Every class, every profession, every walk of life was represented in its grubby windows, the detritus of so many lives pinned like butterflies behind the glass." He also somewhat updates Conan Doyle. A minor example concerns Mrs. Hudson, in a passage that serves as a mild rebuke of Conan Doyle for never having done much with her, so that Watson confesses that he doesn't know how she came to run her house, what happened to her husband, and so on: "I wish I had conversed with her a little more often and taken her for granted a little less." The most important example is the exploitation of street kids, from which not even Holmes is innocent, and gives the novel thematic depth. Watson has a Dickensian social conscience. He is concerned by and ashamed of the plight of London street children ("Childhood is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child"), feels uncomfortable amid the "wealth and privilege" of a British Lord's baronial hall, and notes that most of the cases solved by Holmes concerned the well-to-do. There are some less impressive parts of the novel that may be flaws for some readers. **My kvetches contain enigmatic, mild spoilers, so if you haven't read the book, maybe you should skip ahead to the next paragraph.** First, I doubt Moriarty is necessary to this book, and suspect Horowitz of introducing him only to prepare the way a sequel. Second, there is an excrescent and absurd carriage chase scene in the climax that is unworthy of Conan Doyle. Third, I was able to guess the identity of Keelan O'Donaghue too early. Derek Jacobi is a great actor and a stellar reader of audiobooks. Here he is just right. Without changing his voice drastically for male or female or young or old people (though he dons cockney, Irish, or American accents for a few characters), he reads everything with spot on emotion, understanding, pace, and emphasis, and engagingly brings the book to life. Feeling that the original Holmes stories are mostly fine and sufficient, I have only read a few of the many pastiche Holmes novels, but I did find The House of Silk to most consistently channel Watson's voice and Conan Doyle's vision. Lyndsay Faye's Dust and Shadow (2009), for instance, which intriguingly pits Holmes and Watson against Jack the Ripper, loses hold of Watson's voice ("me and Holmes") and Holmes' persona (he breaks a man's nose in a fit of pique) and lets me figure out the occupation of the killer before Watson and Holmes do. Horowitz' novel really seems to add to the Conan Doyle canon. Fans of Sherlock Holmes and of Sherlock Holmes pastiches would probably like The House of Silk a lot. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University