Novella a Day in May #17

/ madamebibilophile

The Final Solution – Michael Chabon (2005, 127 pages)

An elderly once-famous detective has retired to Sussex to keep bees. Sound familiar? The detective is never identified by name, but it’s reasonable to assume he’s Sherlock Holmes.

“Even on a sultry afternoon lie this one, when cold and damp did not trouble the hinges of his skeleton, it could be a lengthy undertaking, done properly, to rise from his chair, negotiate the shifting piles of ancient-bachelor clutter – newspapers both cheap and of quality, trousers, bottles of salve and liver pills, learned annals and quarterlies, plates of crumbs – that made treacherous the crossing of his parlour, and open his front door to the world.”

Chabon is brilliant at capturing the frailties and fears of old age and fading faculties:

“The memory of the taste of scotch was in his mouth lie the smell of burning leaves lingering on a woollen scarf. But the cords that held him together were so few and threadbare that he feared to loosen them.”

“Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion Inverness there hung, like the odour of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigour and rectitude of the Empire.”

It is 1944, and the old man is asked to investigate the disappearance of a parrot, which has been reeling off lists of numbers of great interest to various shady persons. The parrot is the only friend of a mute Jewish boy, and shortly after it disappears a lodger at the same premises of the boy is found murdered.

The old man relishes the opportunity to use his much-lauded skills again. Yet while it is a mystery novella, this is not the main point of the story. Rather it is about how some things are so huge – wars, the Holocaust –  they defy reason and straightforward explanation. Answers can be comforting, but sometimes they are not there to be found.

 “A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, shivering, catching in the glints and surmises. It was the deepest pleasure life could afford, this deductive crystallisation, the paroxysm of guesswork, and one that he had lived without for a terribly long time.”

15 thoughts on “Novella a Day in May #17”

    • I liked The Wonder Boys, although it’s a while since I read it. I’ve had The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in the TBR forever – it won the Pulitzer but I keep putting it off because it’s so huge. If only it were novella sized 😉

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  3. I’ve had mixed success with Chabon – loved Mysteries of Pittsburgh but have started Telegraph Avenue three times and can’t get into it (but haven’t abandoned it yet!). Maybe a novella is the answer.

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      • Interesting – and yes, plenty of inspiration to choose from. Perhaps also a sense that everything overlaps. Holmes seems to be one of those characters that is so well known – he feels part of our DNA.

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  5. I loved Telegraph Avenue and wasn’t so thrilled with the immmmmmmmmmensely long Kavalier and Clay. Sometimes I think he writes like a dream and then other times his metaphors and similes throw me right out of the zone and leave me scratching my head… what exactly do “burning leaves lingering on a woollen scarf” smell like? My favourite was when he compared someone’s skin colour to boiled newspapers – a thing it’s safe to say I’ve never seen… 😉

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    • It seems lots of people find him patchy as a writer. He seems to write things people adore, followed by things that are very meh. The burning leaves smell made sense to me (my family is obsessed with bonfires) but the boiled newspapers thing is just baffling! If only he stuck to novella length I think he’d do better 😉

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