Catching up #1: Books, Part 1

aka Man's Best Friend Outside of a Dog, #13-16:

The Sherlock Holmes novel(la)s: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon and The Italian Secretary, by Caleb Carr

I don't really know what motivated Michael Chabon to write a Sherlock Holmes-based novella, given that he's not particularly associated with the mystery genre (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a coming-of-age novel, not a detective tale). As such, he managed to write a very different sort of Holmes story than what one is used to: in the wrong era (World War II), Holmes as an anonymous protagonist without a Watson to be found, solving what would seem to be a rather insignificant crime (a boy;s lost parrot). Chabon deserves credit for his technique, in that we essentially know more about the end of the tale as readers than his characters do throughout, a rather difficult feat to pull off. Still, this reads more as an exercise in constrained literature, using pre-existing characters placed in unfamiliar settings, than as a true detective story. Chabon's characters come off as very human, especially the more commonly cold and mechanical Holmes, but the detective story feels like an afterthought. I'm still a bit unsure of the global setting of the piece (a WWII story entitled "The Final Solution" should make the subtext clear), which serves more as a disturbing reality check contrasting the relatively calm and rational image of Holmes' Victorian era with the horrors of the 20th century. Still, not a bad quick read, as is Carr's take as well.

Caleb Carr is an obvious choice for writing a Holmes-based story, as his most familiar works, The Alienist and Angel of Darkness, involve turn of the century detectives, albeit ones that prefer the science of the day to pure deductive logic. Carr clearly has a feel for the characters and the proper flow of a detective story. He may be slightly more technically inclined than Arthur Conan Doyle, and more given to filling in some crucial details for a turn of the 21st century reader that would be more familiar to his forbears, but the conversations and plot developments feel more naturally appropriate to a detective story. Still, for all that the setup is appropriately mysterious, involving a perceived threat to the British crown in the late days of Victoria's reign, the conclusion feels more than a bit muddled. In some ways, Carr's talents lie in stretching out the conclusion of a rather straightforward mystery, the literary equivalent if you'd like of a Law and Order episode, whereas here he has to draw out the conclusion of the mystery for too long, tripping over his loose ends and red herrings a bit. More than anything else, it seems like he just should have had one more go at the draft to clean up the ending, but failed to do so. Again, not a bad book, but rather a quick read of middling quality.

The Author I Love To Hate: Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I hate to go up against both the Booker Prize committee and some members of my book club, but for Ishiguro, how can I not? In essence, these are the same boring book, in which a feckless narrator drives slowly through the English countryside, reminiscing slowly on how useless and feckless they actually are, slowly letting us in on the details. Frankly, it's a terrible style designed to fool the reader into the appearance of deep literature, but it lacks the cleverness that a well-plotted story should have. Essentially, you take a linear plotline, divide the terrible secret into bite-sized chunks, and then place one in each chapter surrounded by long and boring discussions between flat, emotionless characters. There's never any real twist, nor any real action, just a feeling that something more interesting has to lie eventually around the corner (hint: it doesn't). It's "artistic" pacing by dilly-dallying endlessly, and "literary" in its descriptions because the characters are so robotic that it feels like it should be insightful (I have the same complaint about French New Wave directors and their bizarrely robotic characters). In RotD, the main character is Stevens, the butler played memorably in the movie by Anthony Hopkins, who has to face up to the fact that his employer collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, and Stevens never really did a damn thing in his life other than to make exuses. This might have been slightly more interesting had the reader not realized all of this within the first few pages.

SPOILER WARNING AHEAD, skip to the next paragraph unless you want the plot possibly spolied: In NLMG, the narrator is Kathy H, who fecklessly reminisces about her classmates at an isolated boarding school. The big secret, never really well concealed, is that she and her friends are being raised to be organ donors, a la The Island. Suffice it to say, the science in the book is terrible, Ishiguro made no attempt to understand modern bioethics, and he seems to fundamentally misunderstand the notion of marginalized people in society (hint: we prefer to keep them hidden in the shadows, not in front of us everyday, e.g. migrant laborers, wounded Iraqis, third world child laborers, etc.). The book is so unrealistic that it could only work as an allegory, but he never bothers to actually set one up. One particularly caustic review suggested the characters would be more sympathetic if they were revealed to be cows. I would argue that as they go around their feckless, passionless lives in England, that not only does Ishiguro write about england as if he had no experience with the country, where he has lived since age 5, but he writes like he has no actual experience with actual people either. Seriously, I never thought I'd say this, but just watch The Island instead: at least it realizes that with a premise so ridiculous, the best thing to do is turn it into a dumb action flick rather than an insipid, boring novel.