ANTIGONOS' BRAIN

Your Brain is Green
Of all the brain types, yours has the most balance. You are able to see all sides to most problems and are a good problem solver. You need time to work out your thoughts, but you don't get stuck in bad thinking patterns. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the future, philosophy, and relationships (both personal and intellectual).

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Laurie King's Dilemma

The newest Mary Russell book, The Language of Bees, is out, after much waiting by Mrs. King's fans and a huge media circus beginning over three months ago.

I am underwhelmed.

Let me begin by saying that, apart from the inbuilt paradoxes, the Mary Russell books are not badly written, and can provide an evening's engaging reading. In my view, they are much superior to the Kate Martinelli mysteries. But this latest book is curiously unfinished, and one suspects the promotion was ratcheted high because of the weakness of the offering. To be fair to Mrs. King, her husband has been ill for several years, and died just as she was completing the book, so she must have been distracted during the writing of it.

Mary Russell, if there's anyone out there who does not know, is a half Jewish ["the right half"], left-handed, very tall, somewhat androgynous young woman of American origins [but raised largely in England], who meets Sherlock Holmes when she is a gawky 15 year old and he is retired to keeping bees on the Sussex Downs and is in his fifties. [Mrs. King explains why she does not accept the age Conan Doyle -- through Dr. Watson -- assigns to Holmes in The Last Bow]. Ms. Russell impresses Holmes with the kind of incisive reasoning and observation he has traditionally employed, and over the period of her adolescence she serves a kind of apprenticeship that culminates in partnership and [gasp!] marriage to The Great Man. Someone has commented that Mrs. King has written the ultimate "Mary Sue fanfic", "Mary Sue" being the name given to fan fiction in which the author inserts her or himself. The impression is given weight by Mary Russell's choice of academic specialty, theology, which was also Mrs. King's. [Mrs. King married one of her theology professors, a man more than three decades older than herself, incidentally].

In the course of the books, Holmes and Russell [who normally address each other by surnames] have a variety of adventures, some more fanciful than others. Of course they are both adept at all kinds of arcane skills and talents, and become word-perfect in multiple languages at the drop of a hat.

But there is one immense problem, and it's not turning the asexual Conan Doyle Holmes into a man who loves women. It's the difference between the Victorian world, and that of the Roaring Twenties.

Mrs. King has said that she came to the Holmes Canon [which is what Sherlockians call the collection of tales written by Conan Doyle] via the Jeremy Brett TV adaptations. As the British do, these were very faithful to the original stories, but Brett camped Holmes up to an extraordinary degree, and physically he was quite different from the tall, thin, pale, hawknosed figure of the stories. Brett, of course, was laboring under the stereotyped version of Holmes that had begun with the original illustrations and went through several reinforcements in Hollywood, and was anxious to bring his own interpretation to the part.

Surprisingly, the fictional Holmes has always been attractive to women, possibly because of his sheer inaccessibility to them -- he seems completely indifferent -- and his courtesy. In the Canon, the only woman he admired, according to his biographer, Dr. Watson, gained his respect by seeing through his disguises, not because she was a great beauty. I remember having quite a crush on him when I was about 12--well, who could have a crush on a walrus like Dr. Watson, I ask you? [I have been informed there is quite a lot of "slash" fanfic out there assuming he and Watson were lovers; something I'm sure would have deeply shocked Conan Doyle] There's no intrinsic reason why Holmes should not have had heterosexual relationships from time to time except that he probably found all the women he met to be incredibly stupid.

But the big dilemma that Mrs. King has is transposing a thoroughly Victorian character, working in a Victorian world, into the 20th century, and a 20th century that had gone through the trauma of World War I. In all the previous Mary Russell books Mrs. King has teetered along the edge of an abyss, not quite sure of her footing but not yet tumbling in. Now I think she has.

Holmes' Victorianism is not just a matter of speech patterns, although Mrs. King has struggled with these in the past. [By contrast, read Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody novels; she gets the idiom spot on]. The world Holmes inhabited was a world where there were still unexplored parts of the globe, with exotic natives, such as Andaman Islanders with blow pipes. It was a world lit by gas or kerosene lamps; of pea soup fogs, and wild eccentricity. It was a world with more than a touch of the Gothic, where a murderer could effect his crime by letting a venomous snake through a ventilation shaft, or a hookah-smoking gargoyle of a man could re-create an Indian palace in his gloomy Victorian mansion, where people lived in houses with names like Pondicherry or Wisteria Lodge, and arrived there in horse-drawn conveyances.

Russell, on the other hand, inhabits a much more modern and mechanized world, one that has electric light, and the telephone, and gasoline-powered omnibuses. She doesn't wear bustles or corsets, and her hemlines are not floor-length. Warfare on a scale undreamt of 40 years previously have dimmed the impact of Gordon's martyrdom in Khartoum or the defense of Rorke's Drift in South Africa. Scott and Amundsen have raced to the South Pole, and the Victorian Scott lost. Airplanes are already making the world into a much smaller place, and a much less mysterious one. It is, in short, the difference between the time when Soames Forsyte courted Irene, and when his daughter Fleur fell in love with Irene's son.

In this newest novel, Mrs. King does not make the transition from the Holmes we know to the Holmes of the Twenties convincingly. It would be expected that as Holmes got older -- and he's now well into his sixties, according to the chronology of the series -- he would be less adaptable, rather than more. But it is becoming increasingly difficult, I think, to "hear" his voice. He's a nice guy, but he's not really Holmes any more. The interaction between Damien, Holmes' son by Irene Adler [an idea Sherlockians have been kicking around for ages], and Holmes is weak [well, if Holmes is an unlikely husband, one can imagine what a father he'd be!], and Russell is peculiarly indifferent to both the memory of Holmes' previous love and the attraction of his son [who is, after all, much closer in age to her]. Now that would have been a triangle.

Fans have indicated that what they like in the series above all else is the interaction between Holmes and Russell. In this novel, there's more interaction between Russell and Mycroft [who was a shadowy figure in the Canon; he has become a major figure in most of the books of the Russell series] than between Russell and her husband -- a husband, incidentally, who is almost never affectionate in word or action toward his wife. Their relationship is almost entirely cerebral. I can see why Mrs. King doesn't want her main characters to be falling all over each other all the time, but there never seems to be any communication apart from professional concerns in this latest book.

Lastly, I'm getting a bit bored with the theological side of things. So far one book has dealt with a charismatic female religious figure, rather like Aimee Semple McPherson; an archeological find of religious significance is the main theme of another, and now we have a religious nutcase who has written a mishmash of a book [part Scripture, part Khalil Gibran] and is ritually slaughtering people and animals. And who manages to get away in the end, leaving us to await a further book. Of course, it's a topic Mrs. King knows a lot about. [I still don't know why she had to make Mary Russell Jewish, frankly].

Sigh. I think I'm going to go back to Amelia Peabody. The plots are fantastic, and she's an opinionated, egotistic, shrewish bint with a loud-mouthed husband and a very weird son, but I find them hilarious [in the audiobook versions read by Barbara Rosenblat, at any rate]. And in imitation of Mrs. Emerson, I think what I need now is a good cup of tea. Off to have a brew-up, with my last PG Tips...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow what a full and comprenhensive review, though if i had not read the book I would not have recognised your re-action to it. Maybe you need more from a novel than I do.And after all that is what it is, a work of fiction!

I think that what LRK has done with the characters of Russell and Holmes has been imaginative and interesting. It takes a brave soul to take on an icon like Sherlock Holmes and blow out of the water long held assumptions about that icon. Yes i was disapponted that there was not more inter action between Russell and Holmes but the book is written from the point of view of Russell after all, as for Mycroft featuring more that Holmes in the book i would have liked the balance to be a little more the other way, but I am enjoying getting to know brother Mycroft better!

I confess that as i have visited most of the places mentioned in the book I found it very easy to understand the atmosphere that LRK was trying to evoke,ancient sites of burial and ritual are heavy with presence of those who have gone before us don't you find.

finally i am suprised that you did not mention the humour in the book.

Anonymous said...

I was disappointed with the book, too.
I felt it was a broad strokes effort, a set up for another book.

Thank goodness you finally said it....
Laurie's husband was ill and died before this book came out. It had to impact negatively the quality of her work. The dedication seems to indicate the fact.

I felt that aside for the interesting bits about Damian, Irene Adler, the curious event of Holmes not being Holmes as he has been in the past, and the changes in the house Mycroft lives in and his taking walks to lose weight, the story was largely incomplete.
Religious subjects are ok for me, being mildly informed of such topics, but LRK did not offer any factual material as to the historical truths known about Stonehenge, burial mounds, etc.. Mary criticized the tour leaders comments but did not inform readers why they were wrong.

Holmes and Russell often work apart.
I thought it was interesting that there was little communication between the two. Each was on their own course with Mycroft somehow in the center linking them this time out. I thought Mary did become more independent in this book, but she really is nothing very interesting if not reflecting the complex character of Sherlock Holmes in her own nature. That was LRK's intent, to create a female Holmes, she has said. Although the books are from Mary Russell's point of view, her view is not at all as interesting as the world of Holmes and Watson, who by the way, I do not see as a walrus. If LRK were to stand Mary as a female detective Mary Russell would not have made it. Piggybacking on the world of Sherlock has made Mary interesting.

Your points about transitioning into modernity after the war does pose interesting problems for Holmes. LRK could make a very interesting dynamic between the two characters as they each struggle to hang onto a loving relationship, mostly private sadly, and the challenges Holmes will meet working with a better qualified police force and with a young woman coming into her prime while he is, sadly, aging. She has her work cut out for her if the series is going to keep on evolving.

Frankly, I never got what the religous group King created was all about. Again, the stuff Brothers wrote is nonsensical. Yes, Gibranish and gobbldy-gook combined. So he sacrifices people and animals, writes in blood, wants to usher in the end of the world to what end? Does his group survive? What happens to then in a transcendental way?

Why such a long airplane sequence? It was boring.

I believe this book very weak overall, offering just a few high points that those who adore the characters could cling to.

I do think that writing during a horribly difficult time in one's live, the loss of a spouse, had an impact on the book. I kept wondering why no one would come out and say it. I did not out of respect but it was on my mind.

The mystery of the Hive.... I will figure out some symbolic relevance when the second book comes out. Until then speculation is the best I can do. I need to see how the threads tie up. Frankly, the information about bee hives was interesting. That and revisiting Holmes' time with Irene and introducing Damian and Estelle were the high points in the book for me.

LRK has to do better next time.