The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

Chabon takes a stab at adding to the Sherlock Holmes canon, by giving us the great sleuth in advanced retirement, lured out of his self-imposed bee-keeping isolation to help solve a murder and the disappearance of an intriguing parrot. The detection required would have been no challenge at all to Holmes in his prime, and presents very little to the failing octagenarian he has become by 1944, but Chabon is a fine story-teller, and this was fun to read. In an NPR interview, Chabon stated that he would hope people who picked this up to read it because he wrote it would be moved to read or re-read Conan Doyle's stories and discover what a good writer Doyle really was. "He was in touch with powerful, painful, deep stuff, and it comes through show more even within this rather tidy framework of the Victorian detective story." Hear, hear. show less

Here's the problem with "The Final Solution": it purports to be a detective story, right there in the subtitle. And, quite frankly, it's not. It's a mystery, to be sure, but the mystery (or really, *mysteries*) rate secondary in importance. What Chabon seems to really be going for - and, to my mind, succeeding with aplomb - is a character study. Thisl becomes implicit the moment anyone opens the book and meets that character, identified only as "the old man."

"The old man" is none other than the great Sherlock Holmes, who at eighty-nine is now retired to the South Downs to keep bees. Anyone who has read the Conan Doyle stories will recognize him instantly from the details we are given, but this is a changed Holmes: old, misanthropic, his show more era having passed him by but not willing to die just yet. He decides to take on this one last case, not so much to assist the police or the British empire but to restore to a small, displaced boy his beloved parrot. It's a touch of humanity that you glimpse very, very occasionally in the original Conan Doyle stories, and Chabon is absolutely right to call it into play.

In fact, all of Chabon's best writing in the book focuses on "the old man," taking some aspect of what we already know of Holmes and twisting it slightly, or giving it a little alteration to take into account thirty-odd years alone and slowly growing frailty. Perhaps the most affecting sequence is when Holmes visits London, the city he once commanded, for the first time in twenty-three years, and is rejuvenated by the city's strength after the Blitz. "I expected nothing but ash," he says; the parallel between the unconquerable city and the hero who won't die is just moving enough. Not sentimental, not maudlin, but just right.

With these fine qualities, it's perhaps forgivable that the book is *very* slight, and that one of the two big mysteries is annoyingly never solved - Chabon seems to be holding it out to us, like a carrot to a horse, to see if we can come up with the right answer. That's a little frustrating. There also happens to be a rather regrettable chapter told from the perspective of an African grey parrot, which stretches the tone of the book a little too far into the fantastic. Taken as a "story of detection," then, the novella doesn't work; it's neither wholly satisfying nor consistent in approach. But as a window into the last years of the life of Sherlock Holmes, it succeeds marvelously. One for the fans, I think. show less

This delightful mystery novella by Michael Chabon features an unnamed detective, an aged, beak-nosed man of legendary fame throughout the world who is now retired and keeping bees on the Sussex Downs. If this is not enough to identify him to you, perhaps it isn’t that important who he is.

The story revolves around a mute boy—a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany—and his parrot. People are interested in the parrot for numerous reasons, some more sinister than others. There is a murder.

This book is by no means an attempt to revive a beloved character and build on his popularity for instant sales. It is a completely different kind of story, putting you deep within a character’s skin and letting you feel what they feel, letting you show more taste and hear how the world sounds and smells to them. The suspense is tangible from the first page, but it is not necessarily what keeps you reading, and if it is, the ending might be slightly disappointing.

The genius of the book is the changing points of view. You get to experience what it is like to be the great unnamed detective, which never happened in his original books, and you are also treated to the experiences of several different characters. It is interesting that you never get into the boy’s head; in that way he remains the central mystery of the book.

The most marvelous part for me was the chapter written from the parrot’s point of view. It was beautiful, sorrowful, and also skillfully appropriate to the imagined mind of a bird. Once the reader realizes who is speaking in this chapter, she may thrill with the anticipation of getting to the bottom of things, of finally understanding the secrets held by the frustratingly uncommunicative boy and bird. But in fact, as we should have guessed, the bird has an incomplete understanding of the situation. In this scene a man is trying to crack the code of the bird’s numeric utterances:

“How about some letters, for a change?” the man said. “Don’t you know any letters?”

Letters was in fact a concept that he grasped, or at any rate one that he recognized; it was the name of the bright bundles of paper that men ripped open so ravenously and watched so hopelessly with their darting white eyes.

I can’t resist quoting a couple more very small bits, just to show examples of the book’s humor and sensory richness:

It was the least comfortable chair in the cottage, combining all the worst qualities of a sawhorse and a church pew.

The memory of the taste of scotch was in his mouth like the smell of burning leaves lingering on a woolen scarf.

The whole book is a pleasure. It is funny and subtle and poignant and full of life. It is so carefully written, so neat and small, so not-a-word-longer-than-it-should-be, so perfect that it almost sparkles. show less

Michael Chabon's The Final Solution belongs on the shelf right next to "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman. Both are sidelong additions to the Sherlock Holmes mythos, and neither ever mentions the famous detective by name. Chabon gives us a geriatric Holmes in 1944, referred to only as "the old man." The legendary sleuth is now dedicated to the pursuit of beekeeping, and baited from his retirement by an enigmatic parrot and the mute Jewish refugee boy to whom the parrot belongs. There is a murder, leading the police to seek the old man's aid, but it's not the corpse that intrigues him, nor the hints of espionage surrounding the wartime criminal investigation. The story is a quick read, full of sharply-drawn characters and incisive show more prose, and it eventuates into distinctly 20th-century concerns with which Arthur Conan Doyle never burdened his Victorian detective. show less

I read this book in one sitting, and it will be some time before I completely gather my thoughts about it. It is very well-written, and in a style that should bring to mind the detective in the story. :) All of the idiosyncrasies in the book are purposeful, in my opinion, to evoke a certain response. And it works. What is not said in this short novel is absolutely as, or more, important than what is said outright. I keep thinking back to certain references, in the light of the ending, and enjoy what they now mean. I am trying to avoid spoilers here, but what I can say is that this novel is as simple or as complex as you decide it is. And I will never underestimate a parrot!

I'm having trouble coming to terms with this book. Add it on the pile of my ambivalence about Michael Chabon. I think the thing that bugs me the most is the potential for greatness here.

An aging Sherlock Holmes is coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer in his prime and preparing himself for death and battling senility? Awesome, awesome premise. As a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes, I usually refuse to touch modern interpretations, because I don't trust authors to give me what Conan Doyle did to make Holmes so compelling. On this aspect, Chabon mostly delivers: he captures Holmes' greatness in his dedication and flashes of brillance and tempers it with his moodiness and self-destructiveness. It's not, by any stretch of the show more imagination, a Holmes mystery, though, failing in the complete lack of explanation of how Holmes deduces anything (and really, failing as a compelling mystery all over.) Holmes is aging, his brain isn't what it used to be, don't tell us that, show us by having Holmes try his famous Holmes deduction. Show us him missing clues, or thinking slowly, or coming to the wrong conclusions. It's an insanely original, compelling idea, that mostly only reaches it's full potential when Holmes reflects on a post-Blitz London with anger that London still exists in the post-Holmes area and that the Blitz and WWI have allowed it to change and grow into something else. I love the idea of what happens to the characters we love when they move past what they once were.

I think the big reason that this book fails is that while Chabon is good at many things, the novella is not an ideal format. His books become compelling over time, as you become more enmeshed with the characters. Pages give his language room to proliferate and his sprawling sentences feel less suffocating in longer books. There are so many ideas here, ripe for the picking. I can't possible imaging saying to myself "I have an idea for a book that's about an aging Holmes, in WWII, meeting a mute orphan, who will act as his foil, who has a parrot, who knows secret numbers, which may be the key to German codes, prompting discussion of the lengths one will go for national loyalty and exploring the tension between commitment to country and commitment to Jewish orphaned refuges in the middle of the holocaust, while also discussing the morally grey characters who form this boy's foster family and I want this story to be an exemplar of the modern mystery novel. That sounds like it can be done in 170 pages!" Everything loses in the brevity.

What really bothers me is that in the author's note, Chabon writes about the respect he has for "genre novels" and that he wants people who normally don't read genre to pick up this book and it to make them want to go back and read more mysteries. It's insulting to authors who frequently write genre. I agree that genre can be the most compelling form of fiction; it's freed from constraints; it can explore the worlds of possibilities and use that to reflect on the way our world is. This is not a great genre novel, and although Chabon has been a great friend to the melding of genre and literature in Kavalier and Clay (superhero/comic book) and Yiddish Policeman's Union (a much better version of mystery/noir), he should have left this one to the mystery writers. show less

Michael Chabon takes on Sherlock Holmes with this excellent mystery involving a young boy who doesn't speak, his stolen parrot (who whispers seemingly random numbers in German), the murder of one man who tried to steal it, and the search for the man who succeeded in the theft.

I love Doyle's Holmes stories with an enthusiastic and enduring adoration, and normally I won't touch remakes, as it were, of favorite stories or characters. But I also absolutely love Chabon, and I'm very glad that I made an exception for this little gem. Chabon's sketch of Holmes in his beekeeping old age is perfectly wonderful.